Photo courtesy of Christian Rottensteiner from Wikipedia
Oh Italy! I KNOW that there will come a day I will visit this beautiful country. And that day, I can NOT wait for! However, while I'm stuck here in the snow of the lovely midwest (Indiana to be exact) I decided to take a dessert trip to Italy. The country known for some great cuisine is the apparent home of the dessert Tiramisu. I just recently read an article about the origins of Tiramisu and it seem the story is a foggy one, but most fingers (are those lady fingers? haha) point to Italy as the origin of this fantastic dessert. All the foggy history aside, I'm just glad someone came up with this brilliant dessert. I decided to do two different version of it for my last Christmas dinner. I went with a traditional recipe and I decided to make a Gingerbread Tiramisu as well...
I have to start of by saying that my original plan was to just make Gingerbread Tiramisu but I couldn't help but make a traditional Tiramisu as well. I mean I had to have a back up if the Gingerbread was a failure (it wasn't a complete failure). The reason for the Gingerbread Tiramisu was brought on by my dearest Auntie M. She challenged me before the Holidays to take gingerbread and make it in a new way. I couldn't settle on what I was going to do. I had thought about making Gingerbread Whoopie Pies, decided not to but will make those sometime. I also thought about some filled gingerbread cookies but I didn't want to do something along the cookie line really. I wanted it to be something NEW!
The Tiramisu idea came from having to set a new International modular at work. We got some Lady Fingers as a part of the modular. I was so excited to see them that I bought them when I left and couldn't help but want to make a Tiramisu. Having plain lady fingers really didn't help with the gingerbread aspect of the dessert so I tried to make my own lady fingers. Well, that was almost a total FAIL! I found a recipe online, won't try that one again, and I figured I could make it by the recipe and then add to it to get the ginger flavor. WRONG! I don't think it helped that the original recipe wasn't right. Now, lady fingers have very little in them ingredient wise so there really isn't room to play around with a recipe. This I had to learn. After that pretty tragic (it really wasn't that bad) gingerbread lady fingers adventure I knew I had to find another way to make this dessert happen. I decided to take a gingerbread/snap recipe for the lady finger part of the Tiramisu. It worked! The cookies weren't exactly what I wanted but I had go with is due to time. I did, however, put way too many into the dessert. They were so strong they really needed to just be one layer of cookie then the mascarpone mixture and repeat. I did two layers of cookie then the mixture and repeat. I decided to top them with some shaved white chocolate just to make the top look a little better than the mascarpone mix.
My aunt didn't know what I decided on to be the "secret" gingerbread dessert so when she arrived and I pulled out Tiramisu, she was SO happy! While the Gingerbread Tiramisu was a bit much we did have the backup Traditional Tiramisu. The were both rich so a little went a long way. I ended up taking some to work and sharing with a few ladies. One of them just loved the Gingerbread Tiramisu. So after all, I guess it was that horrible, but I want to make it even better! I'll add it to my list of things to do. :)
The Tiramisu recipe I used was from a magazine I got for Christmas from America's Test Kitchen. The Best-Ever Recipes [Link]
Here are the two versions of Tiramisu...
Gingerbread Tiramisu
Traditional Tiramisu
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