Tiramisu

It has been a few years since I made tiramisu. 

I started by trying my own recipe which ended up being a small disaster as I discovered that the sponge fingers packages in the UK are smaller than the ones in Portugal and my recipe called for 1 package but that clearly wasn't enough.

I am a fan of Felicity Cloake's column in The Guardian and one of her articles is entitled 'How to make the perfect tiramisu'. It sounded promising. Alas, we seem to disagree on the amount of coffee and the type of booze. Her recipe was OK but not the taste I remembered and there was too much mixture left over.

Third time lucky. I absolutely nailed it on my third go!

Serves: 6 good size portions or 8 average portions.

Ingredients:

• 4 eggs, separated
• 75g caster sugar
• 5 tbsp Amaretto
• 400g mascarpone
• 250ml coffee
• 250g sponge fingers biscuits
• cocoa powder to dust

Method:

1. Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until pale.
   
2. Whisk in the mascarpone, a little at a time until smooth and combined. I had to use an electric whist as I wasn't doing a good enough job by myself and my mixture was full of lumps.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Add 1tbsp of Amaretto to the mixture and whisk.
4. Whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks.
5. Fold gently the egg whites in the mascarpone mixture.
   
6. Stir in 4tbsp of Amaretto in the coffee and pour into a shallow dish.
7. Dip each biscuit in the coffee until the outside of the biscuit is soft but still hard inside, then arrange to cover the base of a shallow glass dish.
   
8. Spoon mascarpone mixture on top. 
   
9. Add another layer of biscuits and another of mascarpone mixture. Depending on how deep your dish is, you'll get 2 or 3 layers of biscuits so distribute the mascarpone mixture evenly between the layers. I only got 2 layers as my dish is wide but shallow.
   
10. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4-6h. Jut before serving, give it a good sprinkle of cocoa powder on top.
    
11. Serve cold.