Tiramisu

How, seriously how, could I not have made tiramisu until now? A baking freak like me? I mean, I was the one hurling derision at the Great British Bake Off this week because none of the contestants knew what a breton cake was. I do! I've made one! Saw it in the pages of a Sunday supplement and had to try it out. See? That's how curious I am about baking. I've probably tried most of the weirder, harder, or just plain foreign forms of dough making - so it is a bit weird that along my culinary path,  I missed tiramisu. But recently I was given a copy of Claudia Rosen's Taste of Italy - or is it Food of Italy? - it was so exciting to be given it that I was deep into the pages before checking what the thing was called. Italy something. Anyway. It is chock full of beautiful descriptions of regional Italian cooking, and there, about two thirds through, just before you get to Veneto, is a recipe for a classic Tiramisu. Yum. My family loves the stuff. I sorted myself out with mascarpone, forgot to get brandy but hey, you just double the rum, nobody will notice; bought my lady's fingers from a pukka Italian shop near Barnet, the kind where the man behind the counter actually does have a bona fide Italian accent, and even the people sipping their espressos have Italian accents so it all feels like the ridiculous amount you are paying for your lady's fingers over and above what you would pay if you bought them at your local Tesco is well worth the experience of fantasising that you actually bought them in a village near Orvieto. And then I put it all away and waited to have the Mother of all weeks before making it. Why? Because, well, I don't bake for the eating. Obviously my family thinks I do. A promotional leaflet came through the door earlier this week from Waitrose and the headline was Good Things Come To Those Who Bake. Essentially it was full of pretty useless vouchers, except maybe for the free bag of soft light brown sugar, which I still haven't redeemed. Anyway. One of my kids picked it up, added a couple of words to it, and left it by an empty ramekin that had contained some pretty sumptuous chocolate custards I had made last weekend. I picked it up. It now read "Good Things Come to Those WHO LIVE WITH those Who Bake". Sweet. I think that's his way of saying, dam' fine custard Ma. Anyway, the family gobbles up all baking produce and are sufficiently grateful to have me around to provide it, and I get a lot of gratification from their pleasure in eating the stuff. But it's not primarily why I bake it. I bake it, for the pleasure of baking. My best baking time is after a really long and difficult day at work, something hardly anyone else I know understands. Even enthusiastic baker friends of mine, don't tend to bake after work, but at the weekends. I bake at the weekends too, but if I have had a hard day, my antidote is to sink my hands into a bowl of flour. Or stare at melting chocolate. Or roll truffles in rich cocoa powder. This week: a hell of a week darting from issue to issue, meeting to meeting - I ran so often from one meeting room to the next that my shoes needed reheeling by Friday. I kid you not. But at the back of my head, as I bored the pants off myself in corporate reviews, or focused like mad on every detail of a politically charged debate, was, at the first whiff of free time, I am whipping up egg white and sinking sponge finger biscuits into coffee and rum. I mean, I go to the gym regularly - I swim fast and furious lengths, run quantities on the eco friendly running machine, pull weights and box, but none of them induces the same spirit lifting sensation as the anticipation of making something beautiful to eat. And so, today my tiramisu was made. Sponge fingers. Mascarpone with egg white, icing sugar, egg yolk. Topped with chocolate shards, grated and chopped to the sound of female upbeat folk from Radio 6. And now it sits in the fridge, where apparently it needs, like, another 10 hours before it can be eaten. If we were purists. But we're not. We're a family that loves tiramisu. I guarantee it will be gone by bedtime. Yay. Time to bake again.