“Leave the top layer of cocoa dusting until right before serving,” Kinza Malik says, lifting a fine-mesh strainer over a glass dish of tiramisu and tapping it once, turning the top dark and matte.
“It looks much more appetizing that way.”
It's a small, exacting habit Malik has added to a dessert that began with her mother improvising around a shortage.
The recipe calls for traditional tiramisu ingredients—with a notable exception.
Malik has hosted supper clubs from her home outside Cambridge, United Kingdom, since the summer of 2025. She also shares her cooking and hosting through her Instagram account, @kinkeepersbykinza. Her dining table has welcomed a tourist from Hong Kong, a curious octogenarian and quite a few sleep-deprived new parents chasing an evening out.
On those evenings, her husband watches their younger son while her older son helps her serve the carefully curated menu, including freshly baked naan.
The 39-year-old cook credits little of what she makes to formal training. It all started with a spiral notebook her mother began filling when Malik was still in elementary school. She filled it with basic recipes for lentils and vegetables along with a diagram illustrating how to roll out roti.
Her mother was preparing for adulthood a daughter who wanted nothing to do with the kitchen. Malik preferred folding napkins and setting the table. "I wasn't keen on chopping onions and slicing meat," she acknowledges. Her mother, sensing trouble ahead, wrote the recipes anyway.
But her mother’s take on tiramisu did not come from that precious notebook.
Malik traces it to her childhood in Pakistan, when her mother set out to make tiramisu. She couldn’t find ladyfingers, the biscuits the dish is built on, in local supermarkets. So, she used what she had: cake rusk, the dry, twice-baked biscuit found in most Pakistani kitchens for dunking into afternoon chai.
She soaked the rusk in coffee instead, layered it under the cream, and it worked so well that it soon became the go-to recipe rather than a workaround.
Dunk each cake rusk biscuit in room-temperature coffee.
Her mother's foresight extended beyond the kitchen. She insisted Malik study home economics at university, despite her daughter having no interest in it at the time.
Sixteen years and three countries later—Germany, Austria and England—Malik reclaimed the kitchen anyway.
“When I started my supper club, my mother was quick to point out that what she pushed me towards is what’s become my passion and my job,” Malik shares as she opens a box of cake rusk.
What stayed with Malik was her mother’s willingness to work with what she had. Her recipes gave the “confidence to skip, swap or readjust a recipe according to what’s available rather than getting fixated on what’s not,” she says.
That looseness still shapes the way Malik cooks. Measurements remain her “nemesis.” She cooks and bakes by instinct, adjusting as needed,much like her mother, who suggested “eyeballing” the ingredients in the recipes she wrote.
Kinza Malik got the confidence to adjust recipes from her mother.
Her cake rusk tiramisu leaves room for that same flexibility.
“Her recipes were very much about making something out of nothing,” Malik says.
Recipe
Kinza's Cake Rusk Tiramisu
Ingredients
- 200 milliliters chilled double cream
- 4–5 tablespoons icing sugar
- 50 grams cream cheese (optional)
- 250 grams mascarpone
- 1 teaspoon instant coffee dissolved in 2 tablespoons milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1½ cups cooled black coffee (2 teaspoons of instant coffee for a strong flavor)
- Cocoa powder, for dusting
- 1 box cake rusk
Whisking and mixing
- Whisk the double cream with the icing sugar until thick but not stiff. If whisked too much, it will turn into butter, Malik warns.
- Add the cream cheese and whisk until smooth; if the mixture feels too thick, cut the cream cheese by half.
- Fold in the mascarpone so it loosens up and combines well. It doesn’t need to be whisked for a long time. Stir in the coffee-milk mixture and the vanilla.
- Do not add water to the cream mixture; use it only to dissolve coffee separately.
Dunking and layering
- Dunk the cake rusk in room-temperature black coffee; hot coffee will crumble the biscuit before it can hold a layer.
- Lay it into the dish, spread a generous layer of the cream mixture over it and dust with cocoa powder. Repeat the layers once or twice, depending on the size of the dish.
- Leave the final dusting until just before serving.
Besides the biscuits, mascarpone, double cream, milk, instant and regular black coffee, icing sugar, vanilla and cocoa powder combine to make a rich, delectable dessert.
Besides the biscuits, mascarpone, double cream, milk, instant and regular black coffee, icing sugar, vanilla and cocoa powder combine to make a rich, delectable dessert.
Besides the biscuits, mascarpone, double cream, milk, instant and regular black coffee, icing sugar, vanilla and cocoa powder combine to make a rich, delectable dessert.
Besides the biscuits, mascarpone, double cream, milk, instant and regular black coffee, icing sugar, vanilla and cocoa powder combine to make a rich, delectable dessert.
Besides the biscuits, mascarpone, double cream, milk, instant and regular black coffee, icing sugar, vanilla and cocoa powder combine to make a rich, delectable dessert.
Besides the biscuits, mascarpone, double cream, milk, instant and regular black coffee, icing sugar, vanilla and cocoa powder combine to make a rich, delectable dessert.
If Malik could tell her younger self one thing about cooking and hosting, it would be to master the basics before perfecting the more complicated dishes. She has also learned that quality matters over quantity. She also stresses the importance of exercising restraint over the urge to prove something by serving six mains and three desserts at once, the way she used to when she was newer to hosting.
Desserts, however, have held their place. They are still what she most enjoys making.
“People often forget the mains but somehow remember your desserts,” she says.
It is a long way from the girl who preferred folding napkins and setting the table to whisking eggs and folding cream. Malik can see the irony now.
“It’s been a full-circle experience of saying no to something which has since become a major part my life.”
Writer Sunniya Ahmad Pirzada prepares the tiramisu.
More from AramcoWorld
More Flexibility in Sweets
About the Author
Sunniya Ahmad Pirzada
Sunniya Ahmad Pirzada is a Peabody Award-winning journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of race, class and gender and how it impacts people and societies around the world.
Talie Rose Eigeland
Talie is a photographer and videographer who creates striking, intimate portraits. Her captures are bold and three dimensional—while stylized, they remain warm and authentic. Norwegian-born and raised in France, Talie’s career took off in London, where her unique eye and candid approach have led her to work with several top publications and personalities over a career spanning more than 10 years.
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