*Tear*amisu

I just finished skyping with a near and dear friend whose name rhymes with CALM, which she ironically, is not ;). Our conversations, though infrequent, are generally quite lengthy and 2.5 hrs after of pure chatting I was FAMISHED! So into the kitchen I went to dig out the pudding (aka dessert) that M and I had made earlier today.

We followed the recipe his mum, in laymen’s terms, has called “tiramisu”. However, when I served this concoction/scientific experiment of a dessert to him he quickly renamed it “cow splat”. Why? Well, take a look at this beauty.

I suppose we could’ve used it as fertilizer but seeing as we’re lacking a vegetable garden the cow splat went into our bellies instead. And dear lord, was it ever yummy!

I’m not sure where in the process we went wrong…making tiramisu is fairly straight forward (so I thought) and the appeal of making it came from:

a)      The lack of ingredients we’d need to buy (just lady fingers and mascarpone, we already had eggs, coffee, sugar, and chocolate)

b)      The fast prep time (no baking involved! I thought I was saved this time…tiramisu just involves some whipping, stirring, and layering really)

But somewhere along the road of Italian cooking we went somewhere drastically wrong. Where egg whites should have been whipped into beautiful peaks that look like the Swiss Alps, we got something that looked like the polluted froth of Lake Ontario. Where the final mixture should have been firm like my stomach, we got something as runny as my sister’s nose the first time she saw Bambi. But I am a true believer in second chances (this is only true for food, I’m not as lenient when it comes to people) and wanted to try to salvage the remains of our disastrous creation.

So what did we do? Well there were three possible hypotheses in how to thicken up the diarrhea-like mess:

  1. Cook the mixture- I mean, usually when you heat stuff up it thickens a little, right?
  2. Add in flour or corn flour/corn starch- because again, this is the stuff you put in to give some strength and oomph to sauces…right?
  3. Throw in some bananas- it helps for milkshakes and I figured it could add a nice flavour to the dessert.

We went for option 1 and 3 and the result was a banana-flavoured custard.

Talk about a tiramisu of Titanic proportions.

Meh, to hell with it. I went on to finish my thang, dunked the lady fingers in espresso (and downed the remainders of the espresso, which gave me a nice little burst of energy), completed the layering process and stuck it in the fridge. I was hoping the frigid temperature would help in solidifying the liquid mess (I guess I’m a believer in third chances too??), but even that didn’t help. *sigh*. I served the dessert with forks, but a soup spoon probably would’ve been more fitting. There’s still a bit left. You know what? It’s going in the freezer, baby! Because tomorrow I can be guaranteed it’ll be hard as ROCK…like an ICE CREAM CAKE, and that- THAT you cannot go wrong with! Fingers crossed that 4th time’s a charm…

3 thoughts on “*Tear*amisu

  1. Hi Hazel,

    I thought you would be interested to know that it is Girl Guide cookie season here in Canada. I think of you every time I open my office drawer that normally contains an assortment of stationary. Now, it is filled with the pink and blue boxes, with one always unwrapped for quick access. it reminds me of the days that you would walk around with an entire box of cookies in your bag.

    Since you so thoroughly enjoy browsing the internet to build your inventory of useless facts (I saw your post that noted the endless hours you’ve spent browsing Craigslist, the diamond-studded rat traps, etc). You might enjoy sauntering over to the Girl Guides of Canada website. On my lunch hour one day while munching these cookies, I found my way over to a page and discovered that they list recipes that call for the cookies as ingredients. You might particularly enjoy making the recipe entitled “Kitty Litter Cake” – it probably would be hard to mess up, and it seems to suit your style. Also – to entice you further, it calls for chucks of tootsie roll to be haphazardly tossed in…I’m sure you can imagine what these are intended to be :)

    Let me know if you ever give it a whirl.

    CM

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