Tuesdays With Dorie: Tiramisu Cake

What is Tiramisu Cake? Glad you asked! It’s a yellow cake, soaked with a sugar/espresso/coffee liqueur syrup, and filled and frosted with a heavenly mixture of mascarpone cheese, sugar, more espresso and coffee liqueur, and whipped cream. The last time I wanted to make Tiramisu, I went to three stores and couldn’t find ladyfingers. Of course, every time I go shopping now, I’m surrounded by ladyfingers! I wish I’d had this recipe back then.

Megan of My Baking Adventures had the honor of picking this week’s recipe. Check out her “Learn to Do List” of baking and cooking projects – what a great idea! I’m a big list-maker and I’m not even doing something like this (yet). Megan will have the recipe on her site, or look on page 266 of Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan.

What I did (or…musings on baking chemistry and square roots as they relate to frosting): I made 1/4 of the cake recipe and baked it in one 6″ round pan, which I then cut into two layers. That resulted in my babycake having thinner layers than it would have if I’d made the whole recipe, or if I’d baked two layers in smaller pans, but I’m OK with that. I’ve never cut a recipe down this much before and one thing that bugged me was that the full recipe called for 1/8 teaspoon baking soda. Even though I could reduce that to 1/4 of the amount, I wondered if I should, in terms of baking chemistry and all that. I consulted some recipes I have from the book Small Batch Baking and noted that the cake recipes call for 1/8 teaspoon baking soda for a really small batch of cake. So I decided to cut all other ingredients to 1/4 of the amount, but I used a scant 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda.

I was all set to make 1/4 of the filling/frosting recipe, but then I checked in on the discussion with the other bakers and Barbara made an excellent point about surface area and square roots and percentages (oh my!) and I decided I better make more filling/frosting. I made 1/2 of the recipe and had some left over, so I’d say that 1/3 would be the right amount for 1/4 of the cake, at least for the size and shape that I baked.

Last but not least, I used my homemade coffee liqueur in the filling/frosting. Stay tuned for the recipe later in the week!

How it went: Although the recipe has a lot of elements: cake, espresso extract, espresso syrup, and filling/frosting, it wasn’t all that complex or time-consuming to put together. The cake baked up nicely and the filling/frosting was easy to whip up. I don’t have a conclusion on the baking soda amount, but the cake seems to be fine the way I did it. That’s not very scientific, but I’m glad it worked!

I had to laugh at the cake when I sliced it, because it had stripes where I soaked the layers with the syrup. I immediately thought of Jello cake (this might be called poke cake?) – you bake a white or yellow cake and then poke it full of holes and pour Jello over it and you get these cool looking streaks through the cake. Of course, my streaks were brown instead of cool Jello colors. My husband asked what the “splotches” were…I wonder if I could have soaked the cake more evenly or if that’s what it is supposed to look like?

How it tasted: I liked the light texture of this dessert: the light cake and the frosting/filling with whipped cream made it a nice spring dessert. The coffee flavor soaked into the cake and mixed into the frosting/filling was delicious. My husband said that although he prefers “the real deal,” he thought this was a nice play on Tiramisu and he liked it a lot. This was just as tasty the second day.

Would I make this again?: Probably, especially if I can’t find ladyfingers! I usually make Cooking Light’s White Russian Tiramisu, and I really like the mascarpone/cream cheese/brown sugar combination in the filling, so I may try to merge these two recipes next time.

Be sure to take a look at what the other Tuesdays With Dorie bakers did with this recipe!

Advertisement