Blueberry and Lemon Trifle

From Trifle: Heavenly Layers, Michelle Keogh, Penguin Books, 2012.

After Christmas I began thinking about the trifle that was made. I always seem to make the same one, with just a few variations. It was time to try something else.

I took 300g macaroons and spread them with blueberry jam. They were then broken into pieces and dropped into the trifle bowl.

It was now time to make the jelly. I squeezed juice from 4 lemons, making 240ml juice. I poured half of this into a small bowl and sprinkled on 10g gelatine. I let it stand while I made sugar syrup.

The syrup was made with 160g caster sugar in 240ml water. This was brought to the boil to dissolve the sugar. It was removed from the heat and the juice with the gelatine in it added. It was stirred until the gelatine had dissolved. The remainder of the lemon juice was added.

I now sprinkled over the macaroons a little over 100ml limoncello. They did not readily absorb the liquid. I let it stand for a few minutes but there was still limoncello at the bottom of the bowl. The jelly meanwhile had cooled so I poured it into the bowl. Now I had a bowl with the bottom filled with a lemon jelly mixed with limoncello and a lot of floating macaroons. I sprinkled a couple of handfuls of blueberries over the jelly. I covered the bowl and placed it in the refrigerator. I hoped that this was how it was meant to be and that it would all set properly.

It did set well so I now made mascarpone cream to go on top of this. I placed 300g mascarpone, 140g lemon curd and 60g caster sugar in the mixer and whisked it until the sugar had dissolved and all was well mixed. Separately I whisked 240ml cream until it had soft peaks. This was folded into the mascarpone mixture and the whole was placed over the lemon jelly and smoothed out. It went back into the refrigerator over night.

Naturally I compared this with the standard one that I usually make. While this one was very acceptable with its wonderful lemon tang, I think I still prefer the more standard trifle.

Taste: ✔✔✔✔

Ease of cooking ✔✔

Sherry Trifle

From Trifle: Heavenly Layers, Michelle Keogh, Penguin Books, 2012.

Travelled to Melbourne to see King Kong the musical. Spectacular, but not a particularly good musical. While wandering the city though I saw a book on trifles—which are possibly my favourite desserts—and had to buy it. My first attempt at one of the trifles from the book didn’t look like ‘heavenly layers’ because of my failure in this regard—but it tasted pretty good.

The book uses many purchased ingredients such as tinned fruits though details the making of the cake element and the custard. I short-circuited this and bought my cake and my custard ready-made.

The first layer was made of slices of mini Swiss rolls cut into pieces and laid at the bottom of the container. Sweet sherry was sprinkled on the cake. On top of this went slices of tinned peaches. Then custard was poured over and it went into the refrigerator for a few hours. At serving time whipped cream was placed on top and it was sprinkled with roasted almond slivers. My error in the making was to place the ingredients in too loosely so that the custard ran down the sides and hid the layers. The taste wasn’t affected.

I’m sure it won’t be long before I’ll be getting into making more of these delicious desserts.

Taste: ✔✔✔✔           Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔ (easy when using store-made ingredients)