Coquito Tiramisu
Do you know about Coquito? If you have never heard of it before, just sit back and get ready because it is the most delicious holiday beverage around. Coquito is a Puerto Rican Christmas drink made of creme de coco, coconut milk, and rum. It’s thick and creamy, boozy and tropical, and I’m always counting down until December when we can start drinking it all month long. Back when I was teaching, one of my teacher friends made the very best coquito and on the last day of school before Winter Break, she would bring a thermos of it and we would drink it after all of the kids had left, sitting on top of student desks with classroom Christmas party remnants strewn about. If you’re a teacher, you know this moment.
So for Day 10 of our 12 Days of Christmas Desserts, we made coquito tiramisu. Lady fingers are soaked in a coquito mixture of creme de coco, coconut milk, and rum and layered with a more-traditional mascarpone/saboyan cream and the whole thing is topped with toasted coconut. It’s fun and festive and very delicious.
Tiramisu in general is a fairly straightforward dessert, the cream filling being the only slightly tricky part. This one is made with a sabayon folded into a mascarpone whipped cream. Sabayon or zabaglione (in Italian) is a cooked custard made with egg yolks and sugar (and sometimes a sweet wine). Egg yolks and sugar are combined in a bowl over a double-boiler and whisked continually as they heat. When the eggs are warm to the touch and all of the sugar granules have dissolved, the mixture will be light in color and thickened. When used in different applications, like spooned over fruit, it has a more saucy consistency, but here we want it thick. When you lift your whisk out of the bowl, you should see a ribbon mark of custard that somewhat holds it’s shape. This then gets folded into the mascarpone whipped cream and it’s just luxurious, that’s all I can say.
Finally, in one last ditch effort to talk you into making this recipe for your Christmas celebration, I’ve discovered that tiramisu might be the perfect Christmas dinner dessert. It holds so well and is better 2-3 days after making it, which means that you can whip this up tomorrow and then not think about dessert again until you serve it on Christmas Day! Does it get any better than that?