For the past four years, the Hands-On Universe public engagement programme has explored unconventional, interactive and multi-sensorial ways of communicating complex ideas in cosmology and astrophysics to a wide variety of audiences. The programme lead, Roberto Trotta, has reached thousands of people through food-based workshops, art and science collaborations and a book written using only the 1000 most common words in the English language. In this article, Roberto reflects in first person on what has worked well in the programme, and what has not.