Check out Episode 6 of the new food podcast,
Chicken 'n Waffles!

Thanks to a fairly recent post at the Amateur Gourmet and my recent wattle seed experience, I had a hankering for some coffee flavored desserts. If you know me well, you know I will not stop the hankering until I’ve made and eaten what I crave at LEAST two or three times in a row. Chunky is a state of mind and I happily subscribe to it.

I was convinced the wattle seed I bought recently would taste great made up in a tiramisu, but the only way to test my theory would be to compare it to a regular tiramisu. Of course. More cake is always the solution.

Follow up:

So I bought the ingredients (Italian lady fingers, mascarpone, coffee, whipped cream, dark chocolate) and got to work. I made one traditional tiramisu, and one with wattle seed. The process was simple—dip lady fingers into coffee, layer in dish with a mixture of mascarpone, sugar, whipped cream and a splash of marsala wine or amaretto, and sprinkle each mascarpone layer with dark chocolate and coca powder.

I bought a cup of espresso from the local coffee shop to save me some time, and I took some wattle seed and boiled it with a little water on the stove.

This is the wattle seed before I boiled it.

I strained the seeds out and used the liquid for the wattle seed lady fingers. See how big the seeds look now? They plump up like little berries, and are great sprinkled in desserts.

Now, people warn me all the time not to dip the lady finger in the liquid for more than a second, because it will get soggy and fall apart. I don’t like people telling me what to do. Good tiramisu to me has a strong coffee flavor, so that it almost squirts out of the lady fingers as you bite into it. I found that rolling the fingers in the coffee for three seconds instead of one is much better…the coffee penetrates through just enough to soak it but not to make it mush. The wattle seed liquid was a bit lighter than the espresso, so I was interested in seeing how the cake would turn out.

I whisked a container of mascarpone with some sugar and a little splash of rum (because the stupid bottle shop does not carry airplane bottles of amaretto and I didn’t want to fork over $30 just to use a tablespoon of it). Then I took some heavy cream in a chilled bowled, like this

and whisked it for around one minute with a chilled whisk until it turned all light and fluffy, like this.

This is WAY better than the processed stuff and doesn’t require that much effort, I promise. Then I folded the mascarpone mixture into the whipped cream, and layered that between the lady fingers. In between each layer, I also sprinkled shaved dark chocolate on the original, and the chocolate with wattle seed in the second cake.

And then came the hard part. I had to eat it. All of it. Not all at once, but you have to understand…there was all this cake, my partner isn’t a dessert fan, and there are starving kids in third world countries that would be happy to polish off this cake for me. It was a challenge. And I never turn down a good food challenge.

The results? The traditional cake was pretty good. The wattle seed cake just didn’t have that strong coffee flavor I was looking for in the lady fingers, but the sprinkled wattle seed in between the layers really gave the cake a richer flavor. So I made one more cake, this time, the PERFECT cake. I used espresso for the lady fingers, bitter sweet chocolate AND wattle seed on top of the mascarpone mixture, and I finally had the best of both worlds.

Next on my agenda: Vanilla Bean Wattle Seed Ice Cream!!!
~LTG