Tiramisu?

I didn’t miss you at all – actually, if I can be honest, I don’t like you very much.

That’s my relationship with Tiramisu – it’s too soft, claggy, lacks an edge, possibly maybe I’ll get into it when all my teeth have gone.

You know, for that matter, I don’t like most cake – not that I dislike cake per se, it’s that I don’t like half-arsed cake, and that’s what most cake is.

Bring back the old cake styles, like the Chocolate Diabetes Triple Layer Oozy Special, & the Half Way to A Stroke Strawberry Cake.

Cheesecake is another one I could go on about, I must have had 100 slices of cheesecake in my life and only two were truly memorable.

God I am getting old.

Right, on with this article…

TIRAMISU: THE RECOVERY CAKE

It started, or maybe it didn’t, but there’s a craze on SM whereby people strap a tray of Tiramisu onto their handlebars and ride about, finishing off the tray as they go. Yeah, weird.

I don’t have any real issue with this but it does look terribly non-aero…

Anyway, it’s genuinely doing the rounds in cycling and running nutrition circles that Tiramisu is a legitimately good post-ride recovery food, and the science holds up better than you’d expect.

Post-exercise recovery needs two things — carbs to refill glycogen, protein to repair muscle — ideally in that classic 3:1 or 4:1 ratio. Tiramisu ticks both boxes almost by accident:

• Mascarpone + eggs — fat, calcium, and protein for muscle repair
• Sugar-soaked ladyfingers — fast-absorbing carbs to refill glycogen
• Espresso + cocoa powder — a caffeine hit that research suggests speeds up glycogen restoration when paired with carbs

There was a hint in the name all along though – tiramisu translates literally to “pick-me-up.” Whether it actually beats a recovery shake is debatable, but as excuses for cake go, this one’s not bad.

Which brings me to Lancashire, age 15, 1987, brand new to cycling, out riding with the North Lancs Road Club. Almost every single club ride involved a stop at a tea shop and some kind of cake – for me lots of carrot and chocolate cake, the odd slice of Black Forest Gateaux, plus a Yorkshire Tea if they had it.

And btw we never had Tiramisu then, too posh for round my end. Carrot cake was exotic enough for us.

Plenty of Saturdays included a full English at a café too, beans and all – everyone knew you’d need to do a 200 miler to burn all that off, but nobody cared. Nobody was weighing portions or thinking about glycogen ratios. We were just cyclists who’d ridden somewhere, eating something good, and prepared to suffer a little on the way back for that extra round of toast.

You can read more about my visit to the Ol’ Country in 2014 and back to my favorite tea shop here.

It’s called Cobbled Corner, and it’s still there.

Somewhere between then and now, this sport got very serious about food — in the age of power-to-weight obsessiveness, woofing down a cake is not looked well upon, as if casual gluttony were a character flaw!

Fine for some, but being that rigid all the time is exhausting and it’s not why most of us started riding in the first place.

As some French woman said, ‘Let them eat cake’..!

So, deep breath, relax that gut, grab the cake by the neck, open gob and stuff it.

Repeat til you need a nap. There’s my cake recipe…