Tiramisu Cake
Ingredients
10–12 servings
For the cream
- Eggs 3
- Mascarpone cream cheese 500 g
- Powdered sugar 1.5 cups (180 g)
- Salt a pinch
- Liquid vanilla to taste
For soaking
- Savoiardi ladyfingers (10 cm) 32
- Strong black espresso 100 ml
- Coffee liqueur (Kahlúa) 100 ml
- Cooled boiled water 100 ml
For dusting
- Dark cocoa powder 100 ml
Step-by-step recipe
Coffee and cream
The eggs, as I said, must be absolutely fresh. People often use a special heat treatment for the eggs in the cream to rule out any risk. Mascarpone and savoiardi ladyfingers can be bought at the store.
Before you start on this exquisite tiramisu cake, brew a large cup of strong black coffee from beans. The coffee needs to cool while you make the creams.
Make the yolk cream. You’ll need a stand mixer with whisk attachments. Separate the egg yolks from the whites. Put the yolks in the mixer bowl, add 1 cup of powdered sugar (120 g) and liquid vanilla to taste. Beat the yolks until they form a thick mass that doesn’t flow at all and clings firmly to the beaters. Add all the mascarpone and slowly mix until smooth. The egg mixture looks like a cream. And, by the way, it’s delicious on its own.
Put the egg cream in the fridge for now.
Whip the egg whites. Put the egg whites into the mixer bowl and add a pinch of salt. Set the bowl in ice or very cold water. Whip the whites, gradually adding powdered sugar, up to 3 tbsp, until they form a stiff foam that doesn’t slide out of the bowl even when you turn it over. The egg white mixture is snow-white and quite sweet.
Using a spatula, very gently fold the egg white mixture into the yolk cream so they combine evenly into a completely smooth mass.
You can do this with a mixer on the lowest speed. But for some reason, people often complain that the cream separates when mixed. Better not to risk it: with a spatula it’ll turn out well and nothing should go wrong. The finished cream should be cold.
Assembling the cake
It’s best to assemble tiramisu cake in a glass dish or baking pan. When my daughter and I made this dessert, we chose a heatproof glass dish with inside dimensions of 20 by 20 cm and high sides. That let us use 10 cm ladyfingers without breaking them. If your dish is a different size, you’ll have to break some of the ladyfingers into pieces.
Pour the cooled black coffee into a deep bowl and add 100 ml of coffee liqueur and 100 ml of cooled boiled water. Stir: this is the soaking liquid for the ladyfingers.
By the way, the porous ladyfingers soak up liquid like a sponge and go soggy instantly. So dip each one quickly, in a single motion, and immediately place it on the cream.
Lay the first layer. Spread a 1–1.5 cm layer of cream over the bottom of the dish.
Quickly dipping each ladyfinger into the coffee and liqueur mixture, immediately lay it on the layer of cream in the dish, snugly, side by side. Fill the whole dish this way. We ended up with 16 ladyfingers per layer. You can lay them all in one direction or in blocks at right angles to each other.
Divide the egg and mascarpone cream in half. Spread one half over the layer of coffee-soaked savoiardi and smooth it carefully from edge to edge. Add a second layer of ladyfingers the same way as the first. Cover it with all the remaining cream. Smooth the surface of the cream and make it flat; a soft silicone spatula is very handy for this.
Cocoa and chilling
Tiramisu, whether as a dessert or a cake, is always easy to recognize by the velvety layer of cocoa powder on top. Grated chocolate is often used. But it’s hard to get such a beautiful top with it.
Dark cocoa powder is easy to spread with a tea strainer. Just put cocoa into the strainer. Then, shaking and tapping it, dust the cocoa in an even layer over the cream. The layer should be uniform, with no gaps.
Put the dish with the cake in the fridge. This takes a while; don’t rush. It’s best to make the dessert the day before, so it soaks and chills for 12 hours or more. Naturally, the cocoa layer will get a little damp while it soaks, and darker patches will appear. Just dust them with a little more cocoa.
Serving
Before serving, carefully cut the cake into portions with a sharp knife and serve it in the dish it was assembled in.
Transfer the pieces of cake to dessert plates with a spatula. If you like, dust the plate with 1–2 pinches of cocoa.
The dessert is wonderfully delicious and a feast for the eyes. It’s a true pleasure. No wonder its name, tira mi sù, roughly translates as “lift me up,” pull me upward.
If you like, you can make the dessert in individual portions, layering the ingredients in separate glasses. Or, as large restaurants and cafés often do, paper dividers are inserted into the dish and the layers are built directly inside them. Also, sponge cake layers like those for an ordinary cake are often used instead of savoiardi; you get a cake with cream, and I don’t like that.
The cake is fairly rich; that’s what a dessert is for. You don’t eat much of it. As a rule, it’s either a sweet treat on its own or an elegant accompaniment to coffee. Besides, women love it. Recipes that stray from the classic may use whipped cream, chocolate, sponge cake and nuts. Often the soaking liquid contains no liqueur, so you can treat children. Although very often, to boost the flavor and make the dessert even more delicate, cream liqueur like Baileys is used instead of coffee liqueur.
Calories and macros
475 kcal
Serving ≈ 160 g
- Protein10 g8% of kcal
- Fat27 g52% of kcal
- Carbs46 g40% of kcal
100 g304 kcalProtein 6.1 gFat 17.1 gCarbs 29.4 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.
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To Get It Right
If your dish is a different size
The quantities are for a 20×20 cm dish about 5 cm deep. For a larger dish, scale all the ingredients proportionally: for a 20×30 cm dish, multiply everything by 1.5.
You can bake the savoiardi yourself
Ladyfingers are sold in stores, but they’re easy to make at home: here’s the recipe for savoiardi ladyfingers.
Cocoa for dusting
Use the darkest unsweetened cocoa powder you can find. Sweetened drinking cocoa won’t work for dusting: it gets damp quickly and doesn’t taste right.
Have your own trick for this recipe?
Questions and answers
Why won’t the yolks for tiramisu whip to stiff peaks?
They won’t get as stiff as egg whites: a thick, pale mixture that falls from the whisk in a ribbon is exactly what you want, and the mascarpone will thicken it further. Beat the yolks and powdered sugar together from the start, on high speed, for 8–10 minutes. The brand of powdered sugar matters little; it’s more important that the eggs are at room temperature.
Is it safe to eat raw eggs in tiramisu?
The cream isn’t cooked, so the eggs must be as fresh as possible: the freshest grade or farm eggs straight from the hen. People often heat-treat the eggs for the cream in a special way to rule out any risk. It’s best not to serve raw-egg desserts to children, pregnant women or older people.
Can you make a ladyfinger cake with custard?
You can, but that’s a different recipe from the classic one. In classic tiramisu cake the cream isn’t cooked: yolks whipped with powdered sugar are mixed with mascarpone and whipped egg whites.
How many ladyfingers do you need for tiramisu?
For a 20×20 cm dish, 32 ladyfingers 10 cm long: 16 for each of the two layers.
How many calories are in tiramisu cake?
About 280 kcal per 100 g.