How to Build a Tiramisu Latte (And What Is Actually In One)

September 5, 2026

Dessert-led lattes have been steadily taking menu space on Philippine café menus — salted caramel, crème brûlée, and increasingly tiramisu. They sell well because they read as a treat rather than a coffee, which supports a higher price than a flat white on the same bar.

Tiramisu is the most interesting of them to build, and the one most often built badly.

What is actually in a tiramisu sauce

People assume tiramisu flavour means mascarpone and cocoa. In Toschi's Tiramisu Sauce, it does not. The manufacturer's ingredient list is built on:

Sweetened egg yolk — 25% (egg yolk 12.5%, sugar)
Moscato wine
Coffee — 3.2%
Glucose syrup, sugar, flavourings, caramel colour, pectin

That is closer to the actual Italian dessert than a mascarpone-and-cocoa reading would be — real tiramisu is built on a zabaione of egg yolk, sugar and sweet wine, with coffee-soaked savoiardi. The sauce follows the dessert, not the popular shorthand for it.

Two things you must tell customers

This is not a neutral flavouring, and two facts need to reach the counter:

It contains egg. That is a declarable allergen and it rules the drink out for vegans.
It contains Moscato wine. Anyone avoiding alcohol — for religious, medical or personal reasons, or ordering for a child — needs to know before they order, not after.

Neither is a problem. Both become a problem if the first time anyone mentions them is when a customer asks.

Building the drink

Use a sauce, not a syrup. A thin syrup will not carry the body a dessert latte needs and will disappear into the milk. The sauce is thick enough to hold its own and to blend into a frappe without splitting.

Dose the sauce into the cup first and pull the espresso directly onto it. The heat disperses the sauce; adding it to cold milk leaves it sitting at the bottom.
Stir to combine before the milk goes in.
Steam and pour as normal. The egg and sugar content gives a noticeably rounder mouthfeel than a syrup latte.
Finish with a cocoa dust if you want the visual cue — the sauce itself is not cocoa-forward.

Iced: build the sauce into the hot espresso first, always. Dropping a thick sauce straight onto ice will streak the cup and leave the first mouthfuls tasting of milk.

Building the rest of the dessert-coffee section

Tiramisu on its own is a novelty. Three or four dessert builds is a menu section that can carry a price tier:

Salted caramel — the reliable volume seller, and vegan
White chocolate — note this syrup contains no dairy, unlike the white chocolate sauce, which does
Zabaione — the same egg-and-Moscato family as tiramisu, as a topping rather than a drink base
Amaretto — for an affogato build; contains no almond and no alcohol

That last point catches people out often enough that we wrote it up separately: seven Toschi syrups that do not contain what their name says.