Spencer and I share a passion for creamy, custardy dessert like substances, hence our love of Creme Brulee (a whole different post entirely!) At a tiny little Italian restaurant in Mesa, Arizona, I introduced Spencer to the joys of Tiramisu – a lucsious creation that became another staple in our Dessert Night routine.

Just as with the Creme Brulee, we’ve experienced Tiramisu both good and bad, and developed a personal preference – not too sweet, soft, but not mushy, lots of Whipped Cream, and a little intense on the coffee flavor is a good thing.

Typical of us, we decided to learn the process and make our own Tiramisu, after all, we’re both pretty handy in the kitchen, right?

Ahem. If you’re starting to laugh right about now, good. Because we had no clue what we were in for!

Step One – Find a recipe. Well, thanks to a recent article I wrote on the fabulous and wonderful Bella Napoli (Pasadena, Maryland), I had a verbal description of what went into Beagio’s magnificent amaretto-flavored Tiramisu. But a verbal description was all I had. Taking Beagio’s words, we started in on…

Step Two – Finding the ingredients. Coffee – easy. Fluffy, custardy-cream makings – easy. Cookies – ummm… Want to know how long it took us to find lady fingers? Want to know how many different varieties of lady fingers there are? Want to guess how long is was before we decided that for future efforts, we’re going to start baking our own?

By the way, insert the confusion from Yours Truly who grew up in California, where she would have purchased her amaretto at the grocery store, along with all the other ingredients for this experiment – we had the trip to the state store where we sat looking at the array of amaretto offerings trying to figure out which one we should choose.

Step Three and onward – The actual assembly…

First effort, following Beagio’s verbal instructions – just meh. Something was missing. My guess is that in that noisy kitchen, I missed something key. The results were good, but not great. But, we also knew we were on the right path.

And we went through a whole lot of cream and mascarpone that night. Do you know what mascarpone does when you over-whip it? It is not pretty. Not pretty at all.

Taking what we had learned about making a Zabione (or Zabaglione, or Sabayon – depending upon whom you ask), we tweaked the process and tried again.

What we came up with in the end was a delightful mix of three types of cream – a typical, “traditional” Tiramisu cream, a mascarpone and whipped cream combo and the final layer of straight whipped cream. Though we used amaretto, the flavor could just as easily be adjusted to include marsala, Kahlua, or even just straight vanilla.

What we came up with was, in short, a delcectable, delicious, mouth-wateringingly wonderful dish that was a taste of pure heaven.

And we’ll be posting pictures and a full recipe here soon. With detailed instructions so you can try this at home, without going through what we went through.