Simply Chocolate Tiramisu l Jamie: Fast and Simple l Channel 4, Mondays, 8pm

My chocolate tiramisu is the proof that a pudding can be both decadent and simple. I'm gonna take you through three easy steps that will get you from the cupboard to a cake base in just 15 minutes prep. Finished with the quickest creamy topping, it's a game changer. Plus it puts me slap bang in the good books with Jules. Very simple, I've got a little inch of water here simmering away, I've got a heatproof bowl, I've got 300 grams of good quality chocolate, you can get it in the supermarkets. 70% cocoa solids. Take that foil off and just shake it in. So chocolate is very important in the Oliver household. My wife loves it, it's her thing. Coffee and chocolate and in what I'm cooking today we're going to get a double hit of both right. So do not use aggressive heat, you want to delicately melt it. A little sprinkle of salt. I know it's weird, salt allows you to salivate and taste the chocolate even more, it's really important. Next up I'm going to grab myself a couple of bowls. I'm going to go in with 200 grams of golden caster sugar and eight lovely free-range eggs. I'm going to put the whites in here. So the whites I'm going to use to give this beautiful cake aeration and it's kind of sponginess. Over here we're going to go in with the yolks. So look at those colours. Okay so we've got eight egg yolks. So angle that bowl and just whisk it up and what you'll see is it goes pale and fluffy and air is getting trapped in there. So whisk this up until it's doubled in size. Look at that. Let's go and have a little check on our chocolate. Now what I want to do now the chocolate's starting to melt is add 100 grams of butter. So I'm going to turn the gas off. Look at the shine, just love the smell of chocolate. Let that cool down and then the most important thing, the egg whites right. We want to whip up those until they're really, really stiff. So a pinch of salt will really help to give you a nice stiff lift and I could use a hand whisk but instead I've got power. So angle the bowl, start off slow, faster, faster, faster. Noisy but very effective. So look, take that chocolate and mix it in to the egg yolks. Use this whisk just to sort of fold through like that. Add two tablespoons of cocoa powder. Then we're going to take some of the egg white, just a little bit first, then we'll go in with the rest like that and just lightly fold the chocolate and the eggs together. We don't want to batter out all of those beautiful air bubbles because that's going to give you that lift and just be patient. Now one of the interesting things about this incredible chocolate dessert is it doesn't have any flour and it doesn't have any nuts and that's kind of handy for me because I've got two kids that can't have flour. So this is one of those brilliant recipes to have. It's fudgy and kind of unctuous and deep, deep, deep in chocolatey flavours. A bit of a win-win right? So all of it comes out. I've got a nice little tray, it's 25 by 30 centimetres and this cooks now for 15 minutes at 180 degrees celsius, which is 350 fahrenheit and 15 minutes exactly, not a minute over. Beautiful. So we can serve that as a cake in its own right, but I'm going to use it today as a base for one of the most incredible tiramisu's ever. So while it's warm, just make little holes around the sponge and this means that it can absorb amazing flavours. So in the world of tiramisu, I want to pour over 50 mils of Cointreau, that orange liqueur. Just give it a good basting. Then we're going to go in with coffee. 150 mils of the best espresso you can get your hands on and it's going to go in all those little holes. There's one last thing I want to do. Grab a little fine grater and a friend of chocolate, which is orange, and I just want to have some nice golden zest over the top like that. So this is definitely not a classic tiramisu. Beautiful. So the chocolate's cooled down and I've got the classic mascarpone cream and then not so classic ricotta. It's a much lighter cheese. It has a freshness to it and actually the two together I think are the holy grail. It works so well. So 500 grams of ricotta. Then we're going to go in with 500 grams of mascarpone cream. I'm gonna add like two heaped tablespoons of golden caster sugar and a little kicker of vanilla paste. So two nice generous teaspoons. Beautiful flavour. So just kind of take a little bit of time just to beat it, dissolve that sugar and get it shining. Then pour it into this tin. We're taking tiramisu to new heights. Up to the edges. I'm just going to do some little indentations, kind of to look funky, but also to catch the cocoa powder that I'm going to put on top in the most beautiful way. Let's get a little sieve and the idea of having something just a little bit bitter and chocolatey over something so outrageously sweet. What a beautiful thing. Imagine that at a dinner party. People love tiramisu but this is just amped up. Let's get in there for a nice little scoop out. Come on, look at that. Just decadence. Love it. Really nice with some beautiful cherries. That is a dessert to make people very, very happy. Blissful. The chocolate sponge that's absorbed that coffee and the Cointreau is just outrageous. The freshness and richness from the mascarpone and the ricotta and that bitter chocolate topping. Three things in perfect harmony. Can you have the most decadent puddings and simplicity? Yes you can.