Great British Bake Off: Tiramisu Cake

Episode 4: Dessert

Recipe (Technical Challenge): Tiramisu Cake

Continuing along the thread of the last dessert – when the competitors were given this challenge a lot of them were new to tiramisu. This surprised me because in North America, tiramisu is practically a restaurant dessert staple! Granted, it may not always be made with real marscapone, but most people are familiar with this Italian layered dessert.

The recipe: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/tiramisu_cake_13686

The traditional tiramisu is ladyfingers dipped in coffee and then layered with marscapone cheese. Depending on where you go, sometimes it’s two layers, sometimes it’s three (not often) and sometimes they use cake instead of cookies. This recipe asks for cake to be used, a sheet cake that’s halved horizontally and then layered. Unfortunately my cake didn’t rise very well so I wound up cutting the cake into four, so I had a much smaller cake in the end. For the filling, I kind of improvised using a technique I had used in the past. Instead of folding the cream into the marscapone, I whipped the cream and folded it into the cheese. It makes for a fluffier filling and adds volume. Since I had a smaller cake I had to reconfigure the way the cake would sit in the pan and do some creative work with some acetate:

So I used a piece of wrapped board to anchor the edge of the cake and then a bag of rice to support it. I used a piece of acetate on the other end in case the cake overflowed the edge of the pan.

The layering was like this: cake + syrup + filling + chocolate + cake + syrup + filling + chocolate + cake + syrup + filling + cake + syrup + filling + cocoa powder. Here we are at a chocolate stage of the cake…

So when you carefully lift the cake from the pan you get…

And after the first bite…

Gotta say – it was pretty tasty!

Overall: 8/10 (hard to mess up the recipe really)

Up next…the Showstopper challenge!