Please tell me this doesn’t just happen to me: You know when you love a dish so much, you don’t even want to risk ordering it when you’re out because it’s so often disappointing? Hopeless child of the 80s and 90s that I am, tiramisu is a top five dessert for me but I almost never eat it for this messy reason. At its finest, little bits of cake are almost saturated with bracing espresso then burrowed in a cream that’s ethereally light and fluffy for containing an unholy amount of mascarpone and dusted generously with cocoa or shaved unsweetened chocolate between each layer. The sum of the parts isn’t overly sweet but quite rich, ideal in small doses. It is heaven.

The obvious solution would be to make it at home, and pre-kids and pre-this-site, we did this often. Pretty much any dinner party we had was an excuse to fine-tune my recipe and if you told me there was some not-so-distant future when I would realize it had been almost a decade since I last made it, I would have thought you’d gone off the deep end. But here we are and the reality is that good tiramisu, the only kind I want to bother with, contains the following not exactly child-friendly or child-incubation-friendly things:

Very strong espresso
Marsala or rum, or both, you lucky thing
Raw eggs, several

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