Swedish Princess Cake Tiramisu + 15 Years of Hummingbird High

About This Swedish Princess Cake Tiramisu

Meet my latest entrant to my “You Don’t Need Coffee To Make Tiramisu” series—Swedish Princess Cake Tiramisu! Similar to this Strawberry Tiramisu In An 8-Inch Square Pan recipe, it’s caffeine free. The ladyfingers are soaked in a homemade raspberry compote and mascarpone whipped cream flavored with both almond extract and amaretto.

Looking for more unique tiramisu recipes? Check out this Earl Grey Tiramisu, one of the most popular recipes on Hummingbird High!

This trifle style dessert is an easy alternative to traditional layer cakes, with no oven or complicated cake decorating required. It’s assembled in a baking dish and chilled until set, making it a great make-ahead dessert for birthdays, holidays, dinner parties, and other special occasions. You can prepare it ahead of time and let the refrigerator do most of the work, leaving you with a beautiful dessert that’s ready to serve when guests arrive.

A Note About Hummingbird High‘s 15th Anniversary

Happy 15th birthday to Hummingbird High! It’s crazy to think that, fifteen years ago, I opened up a BLOGGER.COM account and posted my very first blog post about baking. Life has changed a lot since then, but Hummingbird High has always been a big part of my life.

First, it was the creative space I escaped to in my tumultuous early twenties as I struggled to figure out what it meant to be an adult. Then, it became a legitimate community where I met other people passionate about baking. All of that then morphed into crazy opportunities that I never imagined for myself when publishing that first post: receiving media recognition, turning online friends into real ones, getting a talent agent, leaving my cushy tech job to “create content” full-time in 2016, writing a cookbook, starring in a commercial, making an appearance in friends’ cooking shows, publishing recipes in The New York Times and articles in Bon Appetit, invitations to attend food festivals, farms, cookware and chocolate factories… until suddenly I was past my mid-thirties and everything had come crashing down thanks to burnout, late stage capitalism, and the existential threat of AI.

I didn’t really mind that the glitzy brand deals and international travel invites disappeared. And though it made me sad to lose touch with my food blogger friends and see so many of them pivot to other things or quietly quit, life had taught me by this point that most friendships are seasonal. Instead, what really got me was that five years ago, right around when I celebrated Hummingbird High‘s 10th anniversary, I started to notice that I was no longer passionate about both baking and blogging.

I thought my waning love was because of the changing landscape and ever-increasing demands of being a “content creator” instead of a “baker” or even a “blogger”. I won’t rehash it here; I’ve done plenty of that in past anniversary posts (see: Year 10, Year 12, Year 13, and Year 14). But the TL/DR is this—I spent the last 5 years since then trying to reclaim my love for Hummingbird High somehow, anyhow.

For better or worse, I’m not a quitter. I will try to find a solution to anything, often sacrificing my own mental and emotional wellbeing in the process. And in this case, I was convinced that I just needed to be less beholden to the whims of faceless algorithms and get full creative freedom back for Hummingbird High. So I decided to head back to grad school (which I DO NOT RECOMMEND—it turns out you can be to old for things). My plan was to find a full-time job that would pay the bills instead of Hummingbird High.

After a tough year and change—and a lot of emotional damage to my well-being, as I said earlier—it worked. I found myself back in the unsteady, ever-changing world of tech. The industry wasn’t the same as it was when I left it to go work full-time on Hummingbird High ten years ago. It was far more unstable, unpredictable, and most of all, relentless, moving at a punishing speed with some new emerging technology called “generative AI.” But still. I now had a steady paycheck that came twice a month, which enabled me to officially stop creating recipes solely for the sake of attracting clicks and virality for paychecks.

With that sense of security under my belt, I gave myself some rules: commit to baking just one thing a month. And that recipe you make? Don’t pander to any algorithms or audiences. Make it something you—and only YOU—are interested in, either flavor-wise, technique-wise, idea-wise, challenge-wise whatever else. Don’t pay attention to how it “performs.” You don’t need that anymore!

At first the ideas came, quick and easy: Thai tea cookies swirled with condensed milk! A homemade version of that wacky Taco Bell Baja Blast Pie! But then, I started to notice something—even when I loved the idea of the bake, I started to dread everything around it.

Researching existing recipes to compare them to the idea I had in my head. Have online recipes always been this bad?

Going to the grocery store to find and buy ingredients. Has everything always been this expensive?

Making the same recipe over, over, over, and OVER again until I got it just right. Was it always this tedious?

Doing the dishes, cleaning up. Has it always been this time consuming?

Going to the store again after the latest run failed yet again. Has it always been this wasteful?

Finally getting the recipe right, but making it YET AGAIN to take photos and videos of each step in the process. Is this even helpful to anybody?

Doing the dishes, cleaning up. Has it always been this exhausting?

Editing the photos, writing my post with all my tips and the perfected recipe, spending the hours of my limited time and energy outside of work to get something out the door only to… crickets. And as much as I tried not to care, I still did. Am I the only one that still cares?

It all came to a head a few months earlier, when I found myself in the kitchen on a Saturday working on these Hojicha Einspanner Cookies. I was coming out of an incredibly rough stretch of work at my corporate job, where I’d been put on a high visibility project with an impossible deadline. I’d been putting in days that started at 6AM and ended at 7PM, 8PM for the last few weeks. I had extremely limited time on the weekends to do chores, get workouts in, do “something fun”, recharge.

But instead I found myself in the kitchen, with my “something fun” trying to develop the recipe. I was making the same batch of cookies repeatedly—I was on my fourth attempt—simply because what was coming out wasn’t living up to the idea I had in my head. And finally, even when I was satisfied by the taste and look of the damn things, I realized I had hours of cleaning up, plus another round of making the recipe AGAIN to take photos of each step of the way, along with yet another trip to the store because I’d run out of key ingredients for that final batch, and then finally more hours of taking and editing photos, writing everything up for the post. Whatever joy, whatever satisfaction I may have gotten from “getting it right” immediately evaporated, nearly diminishing me to tears. Only to be confirmed further when I posted the final recipe—representing hours of hard work done in my very limited time and break from my day job—to mostly silence.

Oh right. I thought to myself, defeated. This is why I used to do this as my full-time job back in the day. It’s a JOB after all. And that’s when I realized: there was officially no more joy left in what I was doing anymore.

So where do I go from here? I think I can officially say that I gave it my best, and that Hummingbird High and I had a good run. 15 years sounds like a good number to end things on, wouldn’t you agree?

I will try to finish out the year with some of the recipes I had planned, provided they don’t lead to more breakdowns—a recreation of the sticky toffee pudding from my favorite London pub, a holiday cookie recipe from an old acquaintance’s new cookbook. But after that, everything is kind of up in the air.

I’m reluctant to say I’m officially quitting—never say never and all that. And for the handful of folks who are still baking from this site consistently, I promise will keep this site up for as long as I can (provided that the cost of running it doesn’t exceed whatever I continue to make from it). But I think I need to try something I also never could’ve imagined for myself I started this 15 years ago: stop baking.

And honestly, that feels pretty heartbreaking to write. Baking has been such a huge part of my life for so long, and it’s been there through so many different versions of myself. But I also think there’s a difference between loving something and being unable to let it go. I’ve spent so much time trying to get back to a version of this space that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s time to accept that.

Right now, I genuinely don’t know if I’ll miss baking. I suspect I will, eventually. But I mostly feel relieved at the thought of not having to do it. And if there’s one thing fifteen years of Hummingbird High has taught me, it’s that life rarely turns out the way you expect it to. I certainly didn’t think I’d be here, writing what feels like a goodbye to something I once couldn’t imagine living without. But I’m proud of what I’ve built, grateful for the people I’ve met along the way, and ready to see what life looks like without baking being such a big part of it.

So thank you for fifteen years, for anybody who’s still out there.

More Hummingbird High Anniversary Posts

• Rectangular 9 x 13 Inch Cookie Cake (Year 14)
• Thai Tea Layer Cake (Year 13)
• Pistachio Pudding Layer Cake (Year 12)
• Swedish Princess Layer Cake (Year 11)
• My Best Chocolate Birthday Cake (Year 10)
• Strawberry Yellow Sheet Cake (Year 9)
• Red Velvet Cupcakes (Year 8)
• Ube Layer Cake (Year 7)
• Hummingbird Cake (Year 6)
• The Best Red Velvet Cake (Year 5)
• A Naked Red Velvet Cake (Year 4)
• Homemade Funfetti Cake (Year 3)
• Pink Champagne Cupcakes (Year 2)
• Confetti Cookies (Year 1)

Baking Tips for Swedish Princess Cake Tiramisu

• You need around 26 ladyfinger cookies to make this strawberry tiramisu recipe. The weight of the cookies will vary depending on the brand you buy. But 26 ladyfinger cookies roughly equals around 8 ounces (227 grams) of cookies.
  
  Unfortunately, most ladyfinger cookie packages contain around 24 cookies, or 7 ounces (198 grams) of cookies. If you’re making the tiramisu in an 8-inch square pan, buying a 7-ounce package of ladyfingers will leave you short a few cookies. So I recommend buying a 14-ounce package or a 17.5-ounce package instead!
  
  
• You’ll notice that the recipe instructs you to whip the whipped cream to “soft peaks”. The best way to determine this texture is to do a test with the whisk attachment. Dip the tip of the whisk into the cream, remove it, and quickly turn it upside down.
  
  If the cream is too soft, it will slide off the whisk, and you’ll need to keep whisking. If the cream has a cloud-like structure but with peaks that lose their shape, you’re at the “soft peaks” stage.