Tiramisu Cake

Servings : 3 layered 8* round cake

This is my Tiramisu Cake, freshly frosted for Eid. It’s got three layers moistened with coffee, and plenty of frosting, cocoa powder and chocolate shavings between the layers. The frosting is a mixture of cream cheese and whipping cream. There’s dark and white chocolate curls on top, finely grated chocolate all around the top and base and a dusting of cocoa powder all over.

Ingredients for Cake

  • 1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature (225gm)
  • 1 3/4 cups sugar (350gm)
  • 5 eggs, room temperature
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour (360gm)
  • 1 tbsp. baking powder
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 1 tbsp. vanilla extract or essence
  • 1 1/4 cup non-fat buttermilk (250ml)

Ingredients for Icing

  • 8oz. or 250gm mascarpone cheese or cream cheese, room temperature
  • 2 cups cold heavy whipping cream
  • 7 tbsp. icing sugar
  • 1 tsp. vanilla essence
  • 1 1/2 tsp. instant coffee brewed in 1 cup water, then cooled completely
  • chocolate shavings for garnishings
  • cocoa powder for dusting

Instructions

For the Cake:

You can make buttermilk at home. Take 1 cup room temperature milk and add 1 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice. Let this stand for 5-10 minutes and then use accordingly.

I used my basic vanilla cake recipe. 

Preheat oven to 180C.

Grease and put some parchment in two 8″ pans. Then grease the parchments as well and dust with a bit of flour.

Sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Set aside.

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Scrape sides of bowl every few minutes using the whisk attachment or a rubber spatula. This is crucial. Otherwise you’re going to be left with chunks of butter in your finished batter. So make sure you cream it well and don’t rush! 🙂

Add eggs one at a time. Making sure each egg is perfectly incorporated before you add another. If you skip too quickly past this stage, you will have a cake that smells of eggs because the bits of egg that aren’t fully beaten in will bake separately in the cake and it will be like having scrambled eggs cooking in your cake, eww! So incorporate the eggs whenever you reach this stage for any cake recipe!! Remember to scrape down the sides of the bowl after every few eggs. Add vanilla.

Add flour and buttermilk in three alternative pours, starting and ending with flour. Mix on slow speed and scrape the bowl during the process. I know, it’s a pain in the butt. It’s worth it. At this stage do NOT over mix, just combine until the batter is incorporated. Over mixing can ruin your cake.

Once everything is well incorporated, use a plastic spatula to fold the batter a few more times to make perfectly sure you’ve got everything will mixed.

Divide the batter between your cake pans.

I put a third of batter in one pan and two-thirds in the other. This way I could split the bigger cake into two slices and make it a 3-layer cake. But you could simply divide the batter equally between the 2 pans and make a 2-layer cake.

Bake in preheated oven for 30-35 minutes. Check for doneness by pressing gently on the cake. If you leave an indent, not done. If it bounces back gently without leaving a mark, done. You can use a toothpick to check also. Don’t over bake the cake! 🙂

Let the cakes cool in the pans for a few minutes then turn it out onto a rack to finish cooling completely. Make sure the cake is cold before slicing to get a clean cut, so you can bake the cakes a day in advance, cling wrap them and refrigerate until ready to frost them.

For the Icing:

First whip the whipping cream with 3 tbsp. icing sugar and vanilla until soft peaks form. Cover and refrigerate.

Beat the cream cheese with the remaining icing sugar until smooth and creamy. Add 3 tbsp. of the brewed coffee into this and beat well until properly combined.

Then gently, fold the whipped cream into the cream cheese using a spatula until combined.

Now take the first cake layer. Using a brush, drizzle brewed coffee all over the top part of the first layer, then put a good amount of the frosting. Dust some cocoa powder and sprinkle some finely grated chocolate.

For the 2nd layer, make sure you drizzle coffee on both sides of the slice of cake. Place it over the first layer and again repeat with the frosting, cocoa and chocolate shavings.

Do the same with the 3rd and final layer, coffee on both sides, frosting, cocoa, chocolate shavings.

Now frost the whole cake and decorate with shavings of chocolate, some chocolate curls, and dust cocoa powder.

The cake tastes even better the following day when the coffee flavor matures, so I recommend to prepare the cake a day in advance and refrigerate until needed. Keep the cake refrigerated until about 10-15 minutes before serving.

ENJOY! :))

 

28 thoughts on “Tiramisu Cake
28 Replies

Leave a Reply