The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.Tiramisu ... what fun, right? Basically there were three parts to this challenge:
- Make homemade mascarpone cheese: Yikes, kind of scary, but oh how I do love the stuff. I was up to the challenge.
- Make lady fingers or savoiardi: Easy enough ... basically genoise, which I have made umpteen times in various shapes and sizes.
- Put parts 1 and 2 together to make tiramisu: A little pastry cream, some zabaglione, espresso (my preference to marsala) and you're in business.
Suffice it to say, my end result didn't exactly turn out as planned.
I tackled the mascarpone first. Actually pretty straightforward ... heat heavy cream with lemon juice until it begins to curdle, drain through cheesecloth, let cool. Mascarpone, check.
The lady fingers were next. I thought they would be a piece of cake, ha, ha, but I must have had some kind of baking malfunction because they turned out flat as pancakes. They tasted delicious, but looked like hell.
I was totally irked (and still can't quite figure out what went wrong), but given that I had that beautiful mascarpone I decided I should forage ahead with something. Tiramisu didn't seem right given the sad state of my lady fingers ... what to do? How could I turn lemons into lemon aid? My solution was tiramisu into trifle, or something in the trifle family.
I lined bowls with the flat and funky looking but tasty lady fingers (kind of like zucatto).
Then used the mascarpone to make a yummy white chocolate cream.
I had some fantastic strawberries from Trader Joes (these things are just as good as strawberries in June ... not sure what gives, but I'm not complaining) so I chopped them up and layered them in with the cream ...
and voila. Hardly tiramisu and hardly a successful Daring Baker challenge, but delicious nonetheless. Back to the drawing board on the lady fingers ... I will conquer the little suckers!!