Had a bit of fun last night with the electrical storms knocking out half of my electrical boards. I also realised (again, happens every time something goes wrong with the electricity… I forget again soon enough) how pathetically dependent I am on power. Not only all the fun things like TV and the Internet but I went to clean up the house when I was looking for something to do while waiting for the electrician and I couldn’t do it. Because I couldn’t play a CD (obviously it must be an integral part of my cleaning up rituals). Very sad. Still with all electrical black clouds there’s a silver lining. I went recipe searching and found an absolutely delicious recipe for chocolate tiramisu. It’s from “Everyday Italian” by Giada De Laurentiis who is an impossibly attractive Italian on the US Food network (at least I can giggle at her name though… I can’t help adding an extra vowel…. hmmm maybe not the best subject for this post… just ignore this aside).

Chocolate “Electrical” Tiramisu

This is a little complicated in that you have to prepare the chocolate zabaglione, but it’s not very hard. Also if you are more a traditionalist then just leave out all mention of chocolate, it will still make a damn fine tiramisu.

First make up a batch of Chocolate Zabaglione with the following ingredients:
1/4 cup cream (the whipping variety rather than the whipped versions)
1/2 cup good quality dark chocolate chips
2/3 cup sugar
8 large egg yolks (freeze the whites to make a pavlova later!)
pinch of salt

Put the cream in a small saucepan (preferably a good quality one with a heavy bottom) and heat until it almost simmers on a medium heat. Take it off the heat and stir in the chocolate until it melts and there are no lumps. You can stick it back on a low heat very quickly (10 secs bursts) if needed or if it hardens before it’s needed next.

Bring an inch or two of water to simmer in a large saucepan.

Whisk the sugar, Marsala, egg yolks and salt until mixed in a metal bowl, preferably sized so it can sit on top of the saucepan without touching the water (ie an improvised bain-marie… if you have a proper bain-marie then this is irrelevant, just use that). Sit the bowl (I ended up using another smaller saucepan because no adequately sized metal bowl was on hand) on top of the larger vessel and whisk the eggy mix until it is “thick and creamy” (I found that a good deal of it became very frothy with the whipping… this ended up being a good thing because it gave the necessary air and lightness to what could be a very heavy dish).

The recipe says to mix until it reaches 160C but who uses a thermometer in the kitchen? (shhh… all you professional sweet makers!) I was happy with it when most of it was frothy and the underlying syrup felt heavy and thick. Once it’s done, take it off the heat and fold in the chocolate mixture with a spatula or similar flat instrument. The trick is not to beat it because then you’ll also beat the air you’ve lovingly whipped in, thereby destroying its ephemeral body.

It is in itself a worthy dessert. Giarda suggests keeping it in the fridge for at least 8 hours or serve it hot and straight away. Either way do it with lots of strawberries.

This isn’t its destiny today, however, we still have a (little) way to go. We’ll have to collect some more ingredients though:
1 normal container of mascarpone (will have to update this)
3/4 cup plain/whipping cream
1/3 cup sugar
Chocolate Zabaglione prepared earlier (supposed to be cold but I didn’t bother, it worked fine cooled for about 15 minutes)
2 cups of Hot Chocolate made up thickly (2x or 3x normal) and with water not milk (you can also use coffee here if you prefer, I don’t, if so remember to sweeten it. You can also try some varieties of cocoa, I’m tempted to try it unsweetened to emphasis the bitterness)
Cocoa powder (I just used the hot chocolate from above
1 packet Savoiardi biscuits (also known as lady fingers)

In a large bowl, stir the mascarpone two or three times until smooth (be careful not to mix too much, apparently it can make it hard… yuk!). Meanwhile, in another bowl, whip up the cream and the sugar to soft peak stage (ie it will hold its shape a bit but not so that you can tip the bowl upside down and it will stay in it… that’s hard peak stage). Fold this cream mix into the mascarpone and then fold in the chocolate zabaglione.*

Finally we are at the assembly stage (and I’m falling aslepp so ignore any ty3pos Sic!), get yourself a nice little dish and layer the goods as follows (if it’s smaller, you’ll have more layers, if it’s wider, you’ll have less):

Layer 1: Dip biscuits into hot chocolate/coffee and place, side by side, so that they fill up a layer of your chosen container.
Layer 2: Cover the biscuits with the cream/mascapone/zabaglione mix

Repeat until you get to the top of your container. It’s then best left overnight in the fridge so that the flavours soak into the biscuits, but you can serve it once it has been refrigerated for a few hours and it a bit more set.

*I thought that you could also serve the zabaglione as a separate layer to the mascapone/cream mix. I would probably go biscuits, zabaglione and then mascapone/cream mix. Also when I was folding in the chocolate zab, I thought (too late) that it would be nice to only very roughly and very slightly fold it in so that it kept a swirly marbled look. Two ideas for next time as I will definitely be making this one again.

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