I came to the sad conclusion a while back that I just…don’t really enjoy chocolate as much as I think I do. Many things sound better in theory than they taste – mozzarella sticks, most pizza, fried foods. gooey chocolate desserts. Heavy chocolate dishes just don’t do it for me, and if I’m going to have one, it needs something like vanilla ice cream to cut through the richness.

This tiramisu, though, that I made a couple months ago now? Oh, yeah. That hit the spot. It was creamy and satisfying, while also being light enough to not coat the tongue unpleasantly. This was despite the couple blunders I made in the process. I used this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, and from the beginning, I was a little off. The store didn’t have ladyfingers, and I was in no mood to make them, so I used Nilla wafers. Not for the purist, perhaps, but it worked just fine, so I wouldn’t be opposed to using them again. Still, not the most auspicious start!

The next issue was that I misread the instructions. Instead of beating the mascarpone with the rum and the cream with the vanilla extract, I beat the mascarpone with the cream. I only realized what I’d done when I tried to move on to the next instruction. I ultimately shrugged and stirred in the rum and vanilla extract, hoping that the lack of “medium peaks” wouldn’t make all that big a difference (spoiler alert: it didn’t. Yay!).

After that, I had to cook the egg yolks and some sugar over a double boiler. My makeshift double boiler, as I didn’t have bowls of the right sizes, was to hold up the top bowl, containing the egg yolks, using a thing that I don’t know the English word for (tongs doesn’t quite describe it, I don’t think, but similar. I think it’s called a pakkad in Hindi?), and whisk the yolks and some sugar with my other hand. Using a salad fork. Because I only used two egg yolks. And given the bowl I used, that wasn’t enough to make a whisk practical.

As I do not own a sifter – seriously, do I look like the kind of person that would own a sifter? I’m twenty two, a giant geek, and I just admitted to a ridiculous makeshift double boiler – I just sprinkled cocoa powder on top using a spoon. It was very uneven. But who cares! Because dessert!

After that, I left it in the fridge for a few hours, as the recipe commanded. Then when I pulled it out to serve, voila!

You know something? It was damn delicious. So turns out, you can mess up on multiple stages of making tiramisu and it will still be awesome because it is cream, coffee, and rum, and with that, it’s almost impossible to make something not tasty.