Ladyfingers

9 DAYS LEFT!!!!!!!!!

I have 9 days left until we head over to the East Coast to send me off to school. That means 9 days left until an entirely new chapter of my life begins. I'm pretty excited for the move; after all these months stuck at home it's about time I return to school and get some real work done. Of course, I'll probably regret saying that in about a month or two in.

I'm making tiramisu because it's my dad's favorite dessert, and Mom's no longer there to reprimand him for a little gastronomical self-indulgence. Plus he had already bought the cream cheese by the time I got home, so I couldn't exactly say no to him, could I?

I've made tiramisu many times before, but always with varying results. Sometimes it comes out great, and other times it's a disaster. The last time I made it was for my apartment-mates, and we had forgotten to add the flour...so it was, embarrassingly enough, a disaster.

Anyway...this time I'm actually starting from scratch. Before I've always bought my ladyfingers at Lucky's, but they always seemed so...commercialized. You know, pale yellow, soft, very store-bought texture. No, I wanted the crisp, uneven-ness of a homemade lady finger! So I found a recipe from Celeste's Sugar and Spice blog (I also used this to make the tiramisu). The ladyfingers came out great...a lot crisper and prettier than the ones I bought before. Hopefully my tiramisu is just as successful...


Ladyfingers

Ingredients:

3 eggs, separated
6 tbsp granulated sugar
3/4 cup cake flour (I used 3/4 cup AP flour + 2 tbsp cornstarch)
4 tbsp confectioner's sugar

1. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Then add in the granulated sugar and beat again until you get stiff peaks.
2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks together, then fold into the meringue.
3. Sift the flour over the mixture, then fold GENTLY until just incorporated. Don't get overexcited here, or you'll have very flat ladyfingers.
4. Fit a pastry bag (or a big ziploc if you want) with a star-shaped tip, snipping off the corner you're going to pipe out of. Fill it with batter.
5. Take out a cookie sheet, then place four drops of batter on each corner. Lay a piece of parchment paper over it. The four corners will hold the paper in place so it doesn't move everywhere.
6. Pipe the batter in long strips about 1 in apart from each other. You can get creative with the shapes, I guess, so long as they are all uniform.
7. Sprinkle half the confectioner's sugar over the ladyfingers, then wait 5 minutes. This will make them crisp.
8. Sprinkle the rest onto the fingers.
9. Bake at 350F for 10 minutes, then rotate the sheets and bake another 5 minutes until they are slightly brown.