Hello friends,
The slight mania and gibberish saga continues; it might be time to acknowledge this is just who I am. There are no real emergencies in my life at the moment and yet each day remains as chaotic as the last. Of course, there is only myself to blame.
For example, was there any need to put ‘make tiramisu!!!!!’ in giant, shouty letters on my to-do list for Friday? The answer is no, there was absolutely no need for this. I knew it was a busy day of deadlines and meetings, and that my local shop had stopped selling mascarpone1, and there was also the very important point that literally nobody had asked for a tiramisu, never mind a homemade one. Yet, there I was on Friday morning checking my tasks for the day when the multiple exclamation marks slapped me around the face.
It actually all went fine, I managed to dip out in between calls and do bits and bobs throughout the day, resulting in a tightly cling-filmed dessert in the fridge and ready for the weekend by 3pm. I managed to get a sneaky extra mid-afternoon coffee out of the ordeal, which was a bit of a treat because insomnia is always in the wings waiting for its chance to pounce, so it's normally only tea after three2. I was going away for the weekend and I'd packed my bag in advance (unusual). Somehow all my work tasks were steadily ticked off. By the end of the day, I was putting my shoes on to leave and feeling extremely smug as I checked Citymapper for the tube when - gasp - major delays for all trains going into the city. Cut to a mad scramble to get out door as quickly as possible in an effort to not miss my connecting train, hair flying everywhere and tiramisu clanging against my leg. When I did eventually get on a tube it was obviously crammed with people and a thousand degrees. I glanced woefully down at the tote bag containing the self-inflicted tiramisu, concerned for its welfare but ultimately willing to sacrifice its integrity for the greater good.
Luckily, by the time we actually cracked into the doomed dessert, it was about 2am and followed what had been a bloody great day of lunch, drag, cocktails, dancing and laughing at extremely stupid jokes. We were celebrating a friend and it had all gone perfectly, everyone was in high spirits and had honestly drunk themselves under the table (there's silly graffiti down there to prove it). Our first course for the midnight feast had been everything left in the fridge including vegetable kebabs, tiny barbecued chorizo, anchovies, olives, green goddess salad, roasted new potatoes and some obligatory chips that we picked up on the way home. But we were still hungry for more, and so the dessert emerged. The tiramisu had clearly warmed up and melted slightly whilst being violently squashed on the way over then had the resolidified in the fridge to create quite a weird texture. Having said that, if you're in the state of mind in which drawing whiskers on your friend’s face with a sharpie is a good idea, your threshold for dessert quality is substantially lower than usual. It wasn’t particularly good, but it also wasn't bad, and we powered through most of the it. I was quite proud.
As I've mentioned before, the joy of eating with your friends is that nobody cares if you make something bad; you've given it a go and everyone's just happy to be there. Everything else we’d had during the weekend had been delicious, including some gorgonzola rarebits with figs and honey for breakfast that morning - go and make these immediately. You'd have had to do better than slightly soggy bottom and deflated top to kill the mood (seven or eight drinks). Good friends might insist they love every bite; true friends will tell you it's shit and then eat it all anyway. Isn't that a beautiful thing.
If you'd like to make tiramisu and not ruin it, the recipe is here:
Yours in egg whites,
Deb
But eight different types of hummus? A strongly worded letter is on its way to the manager as we speak.
If it's not a flat white it just ain't right. Someone hire me to market their coffee brand please.