Italian Cooking Experiments

While I was in Italy I got to enjoy more delicious food than I should have, and even learned to make a few things. One evening we were invited to the house of a couple who have been friends of Meredith's Sansepolcro program for a long time. At their house, she made us a yummy meal and also showed us how to cook it ourselves. She even taught us how to make traditional tiramisu! When I got home, I couldn't remember the exact amounts of each ingredient, but I found this blog and tried its recipe, which turned out to be very good and very Italian! It is pretty easy to make:

Ingredients
1 lb soft ricotta cheese (N.B. this is my light version of Tiramisu. In the original version, this is mascarpone, and not ricotta. A lot of people I know seem to prefer my light version, also because it's more fluffy than with mascarpone - and, last but not least, mascarpone costs like gold in the US, for some weird reason).
15 ladyfinger cookies
2 eggs
~1/2 cup sugar (or more if you like sweet desserts)
2 espresso coffees diluted with ~1 cup water (or ~1 cup american coffee) - cold or warm, not hot
2 tbsp rum unsweetened cocoa powder

Procedure
With a hand mixer, beat the egg yolks with the sugar. Add the ricotta cheese in it, mixing by hand. In another bowl, whip egg whites with a dash of salt in them, till firm. Mix the eggwhites to the other mixture. Mix the coffee and the rum. One at a time, quickly soak half of the ladyfinger cookies in the coffee/rum mixture, and place them on the bottom of the serving bowl. Add half of the cream on top of them, and repeat these two layers once more. Put in the fridge and leave there for at least two hours (usually I prepare the dessert the night before). Sprinkle the top with cocoa powder before serving.

My mom was able to find mascarpone, so I cooked with that. The only change I made was sprinkling a little coffee between the layers, because I prefer tiramisu with a stronger caffe flavor. This is what mascarpone and the cookies look like, if you want to go authentic:


It was pretty fun to make and even more fun to eat!