Meals On Speed

I was meant to make the traditional version of a tiramisu (sans the alcohol) for my cousin’s lunch/tea on today, but a killer headache had me curled up in bed at kiddie-hour on Saturday night.

So with no time for the tiramisu to set and for all the lovely flavours to mingle and mate, I decided I would try a baked version instead. 

A google search led me to exactly what I needed.

Using that recipe as base, I added a little here and there, drawing pointers from a recipe my sister-in-law Fatima had shared with me the day before. And this is what I came up with:

Roughly crush about 30 Boudoir biscuits (A South African brand of finger biscuits). Don’t crush them too finely — you should still have some chunks of broken fingers.

Take a third of the crushed biscuits, and stir in about 70g of melted butter and 15ml of instant coffee (dissolved in around 60ml hot water). Mix till combined, and add the remainder of the biscuits. Pat down the mixture into a springform cake tin. Leave to cool in the fridge. [Be careful not to add to much liquid as the mixture may get a bit too mushed]

Take 3 eggs. Separate them.

Beat the egg yolks with 125g castor sugar till smooth.

To this add 25g of flour, 250g mascarpone cheese, 250g ricotta cheese, 250ml fresh cream.

Mix till everything’s well combined. Take 2 Tbsp of coffee and dissolve in a little water. Pour this into the mixture and stir in. I tossed in a bit of ground cardamom at this stage, because I like how it sets off coffee flavours.

Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold this into the batter.

Melt 100g of Café Latté chocolate (or any coffee-inspired bar). I added an additional 6 chocolate buttons.

Stir this into the batter, and pour the entire mixture into your springform cake tin.

Bake in a pre-heated oven set at 180 degrees celsius for about an hour. Mine’s still shimmied after that time, so I dropped the heat, covered the top with foil so it wouldn’t brown excessively, and left it in for another 15 minutes.

After baking, I popped it into the freezer to firm up for a bit. 

For serving I sprinkled over icing sugar and cocoa, and piled up mixed berries macerated with vanilla sugar.

Originally blogged here.

Thank you everyone for the lovely blog awards. Will reciprocate soon after the frantic-ity has abated somewhat.