There's a version of tiramisu everyone thinks they know — the one from the grocery store case, or the one that shows up at the end of a group dinner in a big shared dish. And then there's the one I learned to make in Rome, in an intimate workshop with Mario and Valentina at La Griffe Hotel — the one made just for you, in your own cup.
That distinction ended up being the whole lesson.
Mario and Valentina didn't start with technique. They started with ingredients — the real foundation of a good tiramisu. Quality mascarpone. A properly pulled espresso. Fresh eggs. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but standing in their kitchen, watching them handle each component with real care, it clicked in a different way. Tiramisu isn't a dessert with a lot of moving parts. It's a dessert where every single part has to be right, because there's nowhere to hide a shortcut.
The space itself set the tone — small, warm, unhurried. It didn't feel like a class so much as being invited into someone's kitchen for the afternoon. That's a hard thing to manufacture, and Mario and Valentina made it look effortless.
By the end, each of us had made our own individual cup of tiramisu — not a slice cut from a shared pan, but something entirely ours, built layer by layer with our own hands. There's something quietly meaningful about that. A dessert this personal deserves to be personal all the way through.
I'm bringing a lot of this back to Ontario — not just the technique, but the philosophy. Sometimes the best version of something isn't the biggest or the fanciest. It's the one made with real ingredients, real care, and made just for the person eating it.
Lastly, it didn't hurt that post-workshop I was able to enjoy a crispy glass of prosecco on the Vineria rooftop!
