Tiramisu Affogato

A dessert for when its too hot to turn on the oven

It has been way too hot to bake this week, although my job prevents me from making that sensible choice, so I am very thankful this dessert can be made without turning on the oven or even using the hob, making it a perfect summertime dish. It takes inspiration from two classic Italian desserts, tiramisu and affogato. If you know me, you’ll know I hold tiramisu in very high regard, it's one of the world's best desserts, and I will order it almost every time I see it on a restaurant menu. Affogato is a much simpler affair, freshly made espresso poured over vanilla ice cream, but I love its low-effort preparation and its easy breezy approach. For this recipe, I wanted to take the idea of tiramisu and give it the affogato treatment.

To make the dessert, we need to make the ice cream, the centrepiece of the dessert. I could have stuck with shop-bought vanilla ice cream, but that seemed like too much of a cheat (no judgement here if you decide to go with that option). I also didn’t want to stand over a hob making custard whilst also slowly melting into a puddle, in my furnace of a kitchen. Instead, I opted to make a semifreddo, a frozen dessert very similar to no-churn ice cream but made with eggs instead of condensed milk. If you have an electric hand mixer, it also only takes a few minutes to throw together. As the semifreddo would be replacing the mascarpone cream from the tiramisu, I made a mascarpone semifreddo. Once you’ve made the semifreddo, there is nothing else to do; everything else is assembly tasks which you can do right as you assemble the dessert, making it a great thing to make when you’ve got guests over.

It is worth noting that this dessert is made with raw eggs, which I know can make some people squeamish. Whilst the risk of getting tainted eggs is very low in the UK and Europe you can add one further step to lessen the risk, if that is something you are concerned with. The semifreddo is made by whipping egg yolks together with sugar; you can do this step over a pot of simmering water, whisking the yolks until they reach above 70ºC making them safe, this being the temperature at which any bacteria will have been killed off.

The original tiramisu may not contain any alcohol, and you can certainly leave it out if you prefer, but to me, the dessert seems incomplete without it. The classic choice would be marsala, but I don’t ever have any in the house, so a dark rum is my alcohol of choice; the flavour pairs beautifully with everything else going on in the dessert and for me, nothing else comes close to working as well.

If you want to make this even more indulgent, there is one more thing you can do to really tip this over into very special territory. When I last visited Rome, we ate at a restaurant called Da Enzo (a place seemingly going viral on TikTok at the moment) and the tiramisu they serve is very different. Firstly it comes in the tiniest glasses, which at first seems comical until you try it and realise their version is unbelievably rich, and delicious of course. The mascarpone cream they make isn’t light and airy, it's dense and rich, and to double down on that, they also add a few small spoonfuls of nutella to the dish. If that sounds good to you; when you assemble the dessert, spoon a little bit of chocolate hazelnut spread (the one from Islands Chocolate would be the one I recommend) down the sides of the glass. When I was making this earlier in the week, I had sadly run out of the spread, so I kept things classic, but I have some of the semifreddo leftover in the freezer, so will make up for this oversight this weekend.

If you want to make this into a completely prepared ahead dessert, you can also make this as a frozen terrine. Simply make the semifreddo as written, but when adding it to the loaf pan; firstly layer the loaf pan with clingfilm (to help remove the dessert later) and layer in the semifreddo, alternating with layer of sponge fingers that have been dipped in the coffee mixture. Once frozen, you can unfold the dessert and dust it liberally with cocoa powder, serving it in slices.