Exhale Cappuccino Tiramisu

Light in fats and sugar (compared to a regular tiramisu) and gluten-free comes our lovely, light and aerated Cappuccino Tiramisu where the star of the show is our favourite coffee brand Exhale Healthy Coffee. 

Tiramisu literally translates as ‘pick me up’ and this dish will do just that, but given the ratios are a double shot of espresso per serving, if you want to avoid caffeine later in the day, you could use a decaf bean.  You could, of course, use any coffee you wanted here. We like Exhale because they are a company that shares our outlook on a healthy lifestyle and brings that to bear in the coffee which is a speciality grade, organic coffee sourced for the best health benefits, then roasted and lab tested to ensure it comes up to scratch. They take a lot of care with their coffee and that shows in its deep flavours too.  

The recipe is all about the coffee, allowing its flavours, aromas and health benefits to shine through. You can make it without the alcohol if you wish, but if you want to stay as close as possible to an original tiramisu, add in a splash of Marsala wine. Its fruity backnotes compliment this coffee brilliantly.  

We’ve gone for the dark’ish roast beans, fine grinding in a small electric grinder, to allow the largest surface area possible when the water at circa 84-degree absorption begins to take place, stirring frequently and allowing to cool natural at room temp in a covered bowl. 

We’ve made the recipe gluten-free using buckwheat flour to make our own sponge fingers to replace the usual mass-produced and sugar-coated boudoir biscuit (aka ladyfingers). We worked on several routes to the success of this recipe: swapping the mascarpone for a blend of avocado and banana (good fats, natural occurring starches and sugars), quark, creme fraiche, even cooking out a custard with corn starch to stabilise it. 

But none of them quite replicated what we were looking for, so we returned to the original recipe that calls for mascarpone cheese, but blending it with a lighter ricotta to keep the overall fat content lower. The recipe and method below hold true to our key covenants, tasty, simple and functional. 

Settling on a path most likely to yield the best results, we’ve ensured that the coffee flavour is the star, keeping other aromatics to minimum, complimentary and natural unrefined ingredients like Maple syrup, organic eggs and organic cocoa powder to finish. Low on great quality common ingredients, this dish also works out at a quite low cost per serving.  

We’ll not lie, there is a time-investment in making this tiramisu, but we’ve chunked it out for you in four simple steps. Step 2 (sponge fingers) can be done days in advance if you want to shorten the time to make on the actual day. 

Once dried out in the oven, they will keep for 2-3 weeks in an air-tight container, so you could also double batch and save some for another day. Stage 1 – The coffee Stage 2 – The sponge fingers  Stage 3 – The custard  Stage 4 – The build