Hello, Baker!

Tiramisu has to be one of my all time favorite desserts, but I rarely ever get to have it. It’s usually one of the first things I think about making when I want to bake, but a lot of the ingredients aren’t exactly common items that you have lying around (e.g. lady fingers, mascarpone, and coffee liqueur). However, I finally managed to get my hands on Kahlua liqueur and Bailey’s Irish Cream (not being 21 makes that a hassle to get) and couldn’t wait to do something with it.

Now how sad is this? Most kids cannot wait to turn 21 in order to be able to legally purchase their own alcohol and go out drinking whenever they want, but I only want to turn 21 so I can actually go into a liquor store and buy ingredients. I wish they at least allowed you to go inside if you’re 18, but no. I’m not even allowed to see what my choices are. Luckily I have great parents that will go and buy it for me.

So now I had the liqueur just sitting in the pantry waiting to be used. What was I going to make? Considering I hadn’t originally planned on baking I didn’t prepare myself with the other ingredients required for tiramisu, but I did manage to find a tiramisu ice cream recipe that I had all the ingredients for. How perfect! So it’s not quite tiramisu, but it’s still something fun to make. I love ice cream and I love tiramisu so a combination of the two couldn’t be bad, right?

Tiramisu Ice Cream

(Adapted from Desert Candy and The Perfect Scoop)

• 2 cups mascarpone (or 8 oz cream cheese and 1 cup sour cream)
• 2/3 cup whole milk
• 2/3 cup cream
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup Kahlua liqueur
• 3 tablespoons brandy or rum (I actually used Marsala)
• Pinch of salt
• Espresso chocolate (see recipe below)

Note: you can substitute 1 1/3 cups half-and-half for the milk and cream.

Espresso Chocolate

• 6 oz chocolate, chopped (I used semi-sweet chips)
• 1/2 cup strongly brewed espresso

Note: You can substitute espresso for 1 tablespoon espresso powder or even ground coffee.

Melt chocolate in a double boiler, then mix in espresso until fully combined. Do not allow the mixture to harden before adding to the ice cream.

1. Place all ingredients (except chocolate) in a blender and blend until smooth.
2. Chill mixture in your refrigerator for at least 1 hour.
3. Churn the mixture in your ice cream maker according to it’s specific instructions.
4. A few minutes before the ice cream is expected to be finished, prepare your chocolate mixture. However, keep it in your double boiler so that the chocolate does not harden.
5. When the ice cream is nearly done, with the machine still running, slowly and carefully drizzle chocolate directly onto the ice cream as it continues to churn. Be careful not to add too much at once or else the chocolate will clump up rather than form flecks. I found that using a fork makes things a lot easier to thin it out.
6. Transfer ice cream to a freezer safe container and allow ice cream to freeze for about an hour or until firm before serving.

I later got the idea to add chocolate flecks when looking at recipes for stracciatella ice cream. Stracciatella is a popular flavor in Italy, consisting of vanilla ice cream and pieces of chocolate. A type of mozarella and even egg-drop soup are often referred to as stracciatella as well. In Italian it literally means “little rags”, which in this case refers to the flecks of chocolate throughout the ice cream.

I decided to incorporate David Lebovitz’s recipe for a mocha ripple in my ice cream by drizzling in espresso chocolate instead. I altered it a bit so mine would be more like chocolate chips and less like a ripple. The ripple sounded neat and all, but who doesn’t love pieces of chocolate too? Considering I was also craving mint chocolate chip ice cream at the time I figured it’d be a good idea replace the ripple with espresso chocolate chips.

Even though it didn’t taste like I was eating tiramisu in the form of ice cream, in my opinion, it still came out great! It actually tasted more like cheesecake ice cream to me, but then again my sense of taste has been absolutely terrible lately so maybe it was just like that for me. In the future, I’ll probably make a form of this ice cream again, but do a few things a little differently (like making sure I actually have some rum to use).

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