Happy new year, my baking friends! I hope your 2014 is treating you well so far. I always struggle with what kinds of recipes to post in January. I know that lots of people kick off the year with a new diet, and most of what you’ll find here is not diet-friendly. But, it’s all about moderation, right?

In any case, on New Year’s Eve, we were cooking and not doing much else, as we tend to prefer to stay in versus going out. We had planned our dinner and got it in the oven. Then, I realized that if our dinner had to have 4+ hours of oven time, I probably wasn’t going to bake a dessert. So, I went the no-bake route.

I gave Quinn a choice of dessert ideas, and he chose tiramisu. I couldn’t have agreed more. I merged a few recipe ideas and made this amazingly simple and amazingly delicious tiramisu.

This is a bit different from the traditional idea of tiramisu in a few ways. First of all, I didn’t use any coffee in it. I’m not a big fan of coffee, but I do like coffee liqueur. I debated a combination of coffee and liqueur, but I ultimately went all liqueur. You can certainly use coffee or a combination if you prefer.

The next difference is the absence of ladyfingers. Granted, I had every intention of using ladyfingers, but there were none to be found in the neighborhood. Pound cake it is! I used a standard 1-pound frozen pound cake cut into small pieces. I know it’s been done before, but I’d never tried it myself. I must say it worked very well.

The filling is a bit of a departure, as well. Cream cheese instead of masarpone, and a generous helping of chocolate chips. Again, it was different than any tiramisu I’ve made, but it all worked beautifully.

We really loved this dessert. Not only is it so very good, it was assembled and chilling in the refrigerator in about 20 minutes. It’s an incredible return for the amount of effort involved.