I like a dessert that knows how to bend.

Are you ready for Mother’s Day this weekend? We’ve already celebrated here – in combo with my Mom’s birthday, which was Tuesday.

I was looking for a good celebratory dessert option – which is a challenge for this celebration given that it included sugar-eaters and non-sugar-eaters. But I found this great, highly-flexible recipe, and thought I’d share.

The Splenda cookbook offers up Tiramisu Trifle, and it’s easy-peasy to make. You start with some strong coffee. I’m using instant, made about half again as strong as normal, but of course, you can use some brewed coffee. Here, I have it in a cold water bath so it’ll cool down quickly.

Next, you mix up some room-temp cream cheese and a little mascarpone (or ricotta), about a 3:1 ratio. Then and some sweetener. The recipe calls for Splenda and a touch of brown sugar, but really, you can use anything – refined white sugar, or honey, or agave. I’m not going to give you any proportions on sweetener. The recipe was a little too sweet for my taste, but then again, I have a weird palate now. Just add sweet stuff until you like it. and then throw in a couple tablespoons of that coffee. If I had some boozy stuff around, like Kalhua or Grand Marnier, I’d add some of that, too.

Then, dice up some angel food cake. I used a store-bought, full-sugar version, which was okay in tiny doses for our hypoglycemic eaters. Angel food is pretty low-sugar anyway. You could probably find a sugarfree version somewhere. I did about 1″ cubes here.

Get a big, shallow pan and pour in a little cooled coffee. Toss half the cake cubes in it until they’re reasonably coated. (Granted, this is not a colorful dessert.)

Then, put them in the bottom of a bowl and spread half the cream cheese mixture over the top. If it were summertime, I might also throw in some strawberries or raspberries.

Sift on a thin layer of unsweetened cocoa powder. You may be thinking that this sounds awful, but let me tell ya – it blends with the cream cheese and makes this awesome little hint of dark chocolate. Mmmmmmmmmm.

Then, repeat those steps with the other half of your ingredients to make a second layer. (Gad, I’m a messy cook.)

Here’s another beauty of this dessert – it’s scalable. You can make a giant dish of this stuff for a crowd, and pile on more layers. Or, like I did here, you can make a little portion for two in a soup bowl.

Cover this bad-boy tightly and refrigerate it for several hours-to-overnight so the flavors can blend. And then eat up! It’s yummy!