A Thanksgiving Alternative: Pumpkin Chai Tiramisu

After only marginal success with the pumpkin roll, I decided that rather than risk another fail on Thanksgiving day, I’d keep searching for the perfect dessert. You guys, I found it! I’m particularly excited because I made this recipe my own, which is something I rarely do with baking.

While I’ve seen recipes for Pumpkin Tiramisu and recipes for Chai Tiramisu, I’ve yet to see one that combines the two. When I looked up pumpkin tiramisu recipes, some used coffee as the soaking liquid and some used straight booze, both of which seemed to miss the mark for me in terms of flavor pairings. After a little brainstorming I had that lightbulb moment: Use chai. Its rich flavor and spiciness are the perfect pairing for the bright pumpkin flavor.

Take a peek:

I used a Cooking Light Tiramisu recipe as my base and doctored it with fall flavors. As you can see, the original recipe strays quite far from a traditional tiramisu - no mascarpone and whipped topping! – so if you’re a purist, you may disapprove. However, I’ve made the recipe many times before and have found it so tasty and foolproof, that I use it every time (with some slight modifications in technique).

Here’s my doctored recipe. For Thanksgiving, the only change I might make is replacing the white rum with a dark rum or maybe even a spiced rum! The rum was fine, but a little splash of Captain Morgans couldn’t hurt, right? Now that I know this works with pumpkin, I want to make other versions. I think you could adapt it for any season. Doesn’t coconut and Malibu sound divine?

In the meantime, here’s the pumpkin chai tiramisu recipe. My tweaks are in bold:

• 1 cup cold water
• 1 (14-ounce) can fat-free sweetened condensed milk
• 1 (1.4-ounce) package sugar-free vanilla instant pudding mix
• 1 (8-ounce) block 1/3-less-fat cream cheese, softened – reduced to 3 ounces
• 1 (8-ounce) tub frozen reduced-calorie whipped topping, thawed
• 1 cup hot water
• 1/2 cup Kahlúa (coffee-flavored liqueur) – replaced with light rum. Could use dark or spiced rum
• 1 tablespoon instant espresso – replaced with 2 fragrant Chai tea bags (like Tazo)
• 24 soft ladyfingers (2 [3-ounce] packages) – replaced with 3 sleeves hard ladyfingers
• 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa, divided
• 1 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 ¼ teaspoons cinnamon, divided
• Combine a dash nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon to form 1/4 teaspoon, or use pumpkin pie spice.

Combine first 3 ingredients, plus ¾ cups pumpkin in a large bowl, beat on low until combined. Cover surface with plastic wrap; chill 30 minutes or until firm.

Remove plastic, and beat in cream cheese, remaining pumpkin, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, plus the spice blend. Beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended. Gently fold in whipped topping.

Steep teabags in hot water for a few minutes. Discard bags and combine tea with rum in a wide, flat bowl. Start dipping each ladyfinger individually in the chai mixture, turning on each side until well soaked. Place the ladyfingers on the bottom of a 9x12 dish until dish is covered in a single layer of cookies.

Spread one-half of the cream evenly over ladyfingers. Put the remaining ¼ teaspoon cinnamon and the cocoa powder in a sifter or small sieve. Sift about 1/3 of mixture over the first cream layer. Repeat layers, ending with cocoa. You should put about 2/3 of the cocoa on the top, so it is completely covered and no cream shows. Cover and chill at least 8 hours (I think overnight is ideal).

Here's a few more pics of the dessert in progress. Make it!

Happy Fall!
Madcap B

Pumpkin Cake Roll - Three times a 'charm'?

Okay, so I’m glad to see I wasn’t the only one with problems this time around. Of course, I hate to fail at baking and I love to eat cake, so I just kept baking until I got it right.

My chosen assignment was Pumpkin Roll. I was kind of approaching this as a Thanksgiving dry run, since I just found out I’m hosting Turkey Day this year. However, based on my experiences, I’m not sure this is ready Thanksgiving just yet. It took three tries to make a table-worthy cake.

The baking was a breeze. The rolling was a breeze. Where I ran into trouble with the first two was the unrolling, filling, and re-rolling. The cake kept adhering to the towel, even after a heavy dose of powdered sugar. So for version three, I switched to parchment paper, which peeled right off.

Cracking was also an issue with early versions. When I unrolled my first cake, I developed a pretty large fissure down the center. The second time was an improvement, but still had a few breaks. By the third cake, I finally got a crack-free cake, which I attribute to the parchment.

The husband loved every one – cracks or no cracks – so overall this is a winner on the taste front. Instead of using cream cheese filling, I decided to make a lighter frosting a) to save on calories and b) because the husband doesn't like cream cheese icing (I, know right?). I liked the cooked frosting –  it was kind of Ho Ho-esque.

I used this recipe for the cake and this recipe for “Not Seven Minute” Icing, which produced a light, marshmallowy cream. I didn’t have allspice, so I blended ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon with good results.

Here's the first attempt, using the towel:

Here it is rolled. You can't see the crack too much, but trust me - it's there.

Here's a view of the parchment roll. MUCH better.

And finally, a cross section.

I’m still considering this for Thanksgiving, but I don’t think I’d dare using a kitchen towel again to roll. Still, if you want a challenge that doesn’t require many ingredients, I’d give this a shot.

- In failing solidarity,

B

Monthly Madcap Challenge: Pumpkin Edition

Our first Monthly Madcap Challenge was pumpkin! I spent all week making super colorful Halloween cookies, so I dialed it down a notch and went with pumpkin bread. A few months ago, a friend gave me a bag of Amish Friendship Bread starter. It's awesome. It's basically a chain letter, but with very moist breakfast bread. You get a bag of yeast starter, let it ferment for 10 days, make the bread, keep a bag of starter for yourself, give starter bags to your friends, and so it goes. It's possible to make bread every 10 days, but if you can't make it that often, you can even freeze the starter at anytime and just bake when it's convenient for you. The standard recipe is great, cinnamony, sugary goodness. But for me, the real fun is taking the original recipe and adapting it to whatever flavors I feel like tossing into bread. I figured it would be a great way to make use of our monthly challenge ingredient: pumpkin.

Pumpkin Bread (Amish-style)

2 c flour
1 c brown sugar
3/4 t salt
1½ t baking powder
½ t baking soda
1 c Amish bread starter
1 c sugar-free applesauce
¼ c skim milk
3 egg whites
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract
15 oz. canned pumpkin puree
1 c chopped walnuts
1 4-oz package of Jell-o flan-flavored pudding mix - comes with a packet of pudding mix, and a packet of caramel sauce
1 t cinnamon
3/4 t nutmeg
½ t ground cloves
½ t pumpkin spice
¼ t ground ginger
extra cinnamon / sugar for sprinkling

Only use non-metal bowls and mixers for the bread. You can bake the bread in a metal pan, but no other metal should touch the batter during the mixing process.

Preheat oven to 325. Mix all ingredients in a bowl, except the caramel sauce packet.

Grease two large loaf pans. I use two casserole dishes, which results in more surface area per piece, and therefore more cinnamon / sugar to bread ratio. Dust pans with ½ c sugar and some cinnamon. Drizzle the caramel sauce in the pans.

Put batter in pans, sprinkle with more sugar and cinnamon.

Bake 1 hour. Cool 15 minutes. Remove loaves from pan and serve warm or cold.

Until next time - 

Madcap Baker J