This is a pretty cake. And, in Dorie’s Book, Baking From My Home to Yours it is even prettier.

We ate this cake on, May 28th, our tenth anniversary. We had plans to go to Atlanta for the weekend, but on this Thursday night we invited our friends join for dinner who also hit their tenth this year, with their twin 20-month old boys and my mom.

I made my husband’s favorite pesto pasta with scallops and shrimp and we are all still talking about how much those little boys ate. It was a night of joy!

My mom has a great sense of fun and romance and she supplied the stick figures, yet another one of her thrift shop finds. She also brought us flowers and my step mother sent us a card and gift certificate. It means a lot to us when our family is just as excited to celebrate our marriage with us as we are.

I don’t come from a family that celebrated many wedding milestones. It was more like divorce court and chaos. My grandparents managed to stay together, but they led separate lives, slept in separate rooms.

These past ten years have flown by so fast, and I feel blessed to be married to a man that makes me oatmeal and cappuccino every morning.

I wish I could say that making this cake is as easy as these last ten years of marriage. But, alas, this cake had to be made twice.  Take a look at the picture below and you will see the failures on the right. While they still tasted good, they were not nearly light or high enough to slice through the center and make a four-layer cake, and I wasn’t going to waste a very expensive raspberry jam on cake flops. I made them again and succeeded. My first time around I didn’t use cake flour, but used all purpose flour.

I learned a hard lesson…when a recipe calls for cake flour, use cake flour!

And, then there is one more reason. The cake, has a stick of butter which is fine, but the frosting has THREE sticks of butter and while one might think the more butter, the better, but I couldn’t eat it. This means four sticks of butter for the entire cake. Even if you could cut 12 pieces, that is 1/3 stick of butter per piece of cake.

When I originally read the ingredients, I was hesitant, but something inside me made me make this cake. I needed to see what four sticks of butter would do. In staying real, I couldn’t eat the frosting. I did enjoy the insides of the cake, and I love the idea of this type of cake. But, when I asked my friends if they would like to take some cake home, my girlfriend declined.

Now, in all fairness, the men liked the cake and her husband was happy that I delivered the rest of it to them the next day. But, she and I had absolutely no desire to eat a second piece.We adore coconut cake. Our wedding cake was a coconut cake made from an old time baker in Long Beach, California and we ate 3 pieces each at least the night of our wedding. It was unforgettable.

This could be unforgettable if there was a different frosting. I would probably fall back on the frosting here minus the lemon and adding in coconut.

Thanks to Carol of mix, mix, stir, stir for choosing the recipe.

Recipe for Cake
2 1/4 cups cake flour
1 tablespoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups whole milk or buttermilk (I used buttermilk)
4 large egg whites
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon pure lemon extract

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I will have to agree with him. The cake, while a great tasting cake, seems to be a dessert unto itself. Even though the cake was good to eat, that frame of reference comparing it to tiramisu was there and that made it hard to appreciate. A traditional tiramisu is soaked with liquor and espresso and slathered with mascarpone cheese, made into a fluffy custard, and best eaten with a spoon. The ratio of cream to cake is closer to 1 to 1. This recipe threw us off a bit, because there is a lot more cake than cream.

The recipe calls for espresso syrup and Kahlúa (or amaretto or brandy), but I think it needed more of each. As much as I thought I soaked the cake with the syrup, it went almost unnoticed and I had a feeling it wasn’t enough. Maybe it was something in the way I made the cake, but it needed more espresso flavor. And it needed to be wetter. But, as you can see, I can’t seem to get away from comparing it to a traditional tiramisu.

Aside from making a large cake, I made two smaller tarts, just right to put into the above cappuccino cups. I think I like it best made this way, and eaten more like pudding cake, as long there is added syrup to make the cake really wet.

Having said all of that, I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few days and if I were to remake it, I would do one of several things:

Slice each cake in two, making it a four-layer cake and soaking each layer with a bit more espresso syrup.

• Make cupcakes and fill each with some of the cream and again on top, layer the chocolate between two layers of cream frosting.

• Make one layer in a rectangular pan and double the syrup.

Mascarpone Cheese, a Key Ingredient
The good news is that it is still hard to go wrong with anything that has mascarpone cheese, a triple cream cheese, originating in Italy.

The cows that produce mascarpone are fed herbs and flowers. Can you imagine the thought behind that? It is not really a cheese, but a culture that is added to the cream of skim milk. It is delicious eaten by itself with fruit, often seen in dessert cakes, but can also be included in a savory dish and made into a pasta sauce.

It’s quite rich, and a little goes a long way. It used to be found only in gourmet stores, but the popularity of tiramisu has made mascarpone much more readily available at the local grocer.

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Tuesdays with Dorie: Tiramisu Cake

A tiramisu cake I refer to as a cappuccino cake, adapted from Baking From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan.

Servings 10

Ingredients

• CAKE INGREDIENTS
• 2 cups cake flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/4 cups butter unsalted at room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 large egg yolk
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 3/4 cup buttermilk
• ESPRESSO EXTRACT
• 2 T instant espresso powder
• 2 T boiling water
• ESPRESSO SYRUP INGREDIENTS
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon Kahlúa or brandy
• FILLING & FROSTING INGREDIENTS
• 1 8 oz mascarpone
• 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar sifted
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 tablespoons Kahlúa or brandy
• 1 cup cold heavy cream
• 3 oz bittersweet or semisweet chocolate divided.

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees
• Sift cake flour, baking powder, salt in bowl. Set aside.
• Beat butter until creamy with a paddle attachment with mixer or electric mixer for three minutes.
• Cream sugar and butter for three minutes.
• Add eggs one at a time and beat for a minute each. Add vanilla
• On low speed add in buttermilk and dry ingredients in three additions. Begin and end with flour mixture.
• Bake for 28 to 30 minutes at 350.
• ESPRESSO EXTRACT INSTRUCTIONS (See Note)
• Mix together until blended. Set Aside.
• ESPRESSO SYRUP INSTRUCTIONS (See Note)
• Bring sugar and water together just until boiling. Add above espresso extract and liqueur or brandy. Set aside.
• FILLING AND FROSTING INSTRUCTIONS
• Blend mascarpone, confectioner's sugar, vanilla and Kahlúa or brandy and whisk just until smooth.
• Whip heavy cream until it holds stiff peaks. Using a rubber spatula stir in 1/4 of whipped cream into the mascarpone.
• Gently fold in remaining whipped cream.
• ASSEMBLE CAKE
• FOR A FOUR LAYER CAKE
• Bake cakes in two 9 inch pans. Divide into 4 equal parts.
• Using pastry brush, brush some espresso syrup over bottom layer, saving 1 tablespoon of the syrup for the final frosting.
• Shave chocolate. You will use this for each layer, sparingly.
• Save some of this for the final decorating step.
• Spread some mascarpone cream over and gently press some of the chopped chocolate into the filling.
• Use 1 cup or so only for this step, saving the frosting for the final layer.
• Repeat with each of first three layers.
• FINAL FROSTING INSTRUCTIONS
• Whisk the remaining 1 tablespoon of espresso extract into the remaining mascarpone filling. Apply frosting on sides and top.
• Decorate with espresso beans or my personal choice, some shaved chocolate.
• Refrigerate, but serve a little less chilled. Take out 30 minutes prior to serving.

Notes

This is the original recipe for the espresso syrup. I suggest doubling this and then using only what you need, which might be all of it. You will need to double the espresso extract also.

• Make cupcakes and fill each with some of the cream and again on top, layer the chocolate between two layers of cream frosting.

• Make one layer in a rectangular pan and double the syrup ingredients.

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