Cooking Project: Drunken (In More Ways Than One) Tiramisu

There’s a lot of foods that I spent wasted not liking certain foods. Mushrooms are one example. Tiramisu is another. In my defence, there’s a lot of awful tiramisus out there. When someone tells me that they don’t like tiramisu I always wonder, maybe they’ve just had awful ones and they haven’t found the right one yet.

I can’t remember what turned me onto it and I’m still very cautious about having it in restaurants unless I’m sure it’s going to be good. I’d like to think that my conversion came about when my friend Jess made this Nigella recipe and I realised it doesn’t have to be a soggy mess, it can be light and fluffy and you don’t notice yourself eating the entire thing.

I had bought the ingredients for this a few days ago and had planned to make it for Sunday lunch dessert. The only problem is I forgot one needs to let it sit overnight so that’s how I ended up making tiramisu at 2am in the morning after having a few drinks.

I started by making incredibly strong coffee using instant espresso powder and added in some Lidl Baileys (just as good as the real thing). Then I soaked the biscuits in this mix, somehow (maybe it was as a result of the cocktails)  but I ran out of liquid before I ran out of biscuits. I didn’t get too worried (another result of the cocktails) and lined these up in a dish.

After separating the eggs I attempted to, as the recipe instructs, to make a sort of mousse with the egg, sugar, Baileys and mascarpone. I wouldn’t really describe what I made as a mousse but as this stage I wasn’t going to argue (with myself) and popped it onto the biscuit layer.

I did another layer, covered the whole thing with clingfilm and went to sleep. The following day while trying to make sure all the parts of a roast dinner came together I paused to sprinkle over some cocoa powder – this was my fatal error. If following a recipe and something feels a little off, change it! I thought it was a lot of cocoa powder but figured Nigella knows better than me. When I took my first bite I knew my instincts were right, it was far too much and the texture was off.

It didn’t stop me from finishing the dish while watching the Real Housewives of Melbourne i n my pjs. Cheers.