Day 33

Last night I thought it would be fun to make one of our all time favorite desserts. I didn’t foresee it as being a difficult activity, but I was wrong. Again. Just like the origami last night, I had high hopes for an easy and straightforward activity. I continue to be surprised.

Making tiramisu from scratch.

I didn’t think it would be too hard, but I guess taking on the challenge of making our own ladyfingers was a little too ambitious. They seem easy enough, but what we ended up with was more like a sweet, sticky, scrambled omelet.

The only salvageable pieces were layered in a tiny bowl and presented to Joe. Luckily the espresso flavored “sauce” and mascarpone filling seemed to come out as planned.

It looked like tiramisu, but would it taste like it?

Verdict? Not really. It tasted like rum flavored scrambled eggs. Yes, there was rum in the recipe which threw me for a loop – but we also didn’t give it the necessary 4 hours to soak and set in the fridge.

We didn’t lose all hope, though. We decided to press on and abandon the idea of using homemade ladyfingers. I felt pretty down about it, as I usually don’t have such disastrous results in the kitchen. I suggested that Joe go to the store and buy some pre-made fingers which he happily did.

The store bought ladyfingers worked perfectly, and soon we had what resembled real tiramisu!

I made sure to shave a lot of chocolate on top.

Into the fridge it went to set for 4 hours. That meant it would be ready to  eat at midnight, which we obviously weren’t going to do, so we went to bed.

This morning I pulled it out and cut myself a piece. I immediately noticed that we had probably over-soaked the top layer of ladyfingers and under-soaked the bottom. But it still looked really good.

It was a little weird to eat tiramisu at 7:00 am but hey, you do what you gotta do.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the taste spot on! It tasted just as tiramisu should, but with some minor texture issues due to the soaking. I’ll deem this one a semi-success.

This was Joe’s first foray into baking and I wish the results had been more pleasant so he’d be willing to try it again. It was a real bummer to put all the time and energy into making the ladyfingers only to have them come out completely unusable. Live and learn I guess. It was fun to be in the kitchen together, but I’ll leave all further projects of this nature for the weekends. It just took too much time and we had to wait forever to eat it. After cooking dinner together we immediately worked on the tiramisu which had us in the kitchen for about 3 hours. Talk about exhausting.

Thank God this week is coming to an end because this was not our week for Project NEW-lyweds. Here’s hoping that today and this weekend are better. TGIF!