Holiday - This is a holiday favorite
See our pound cake recipe for more on this. We use Edna Lewis' pound cake when we make this, but lately, we've just been serving the pound cake.
English Trifle Drover's
English Trifle Drover's (from Gourmet 6/81)
This is actually our variant of the Gourmet recipe Ń they make a GŽnoise batter cake while we use Edna Lewis's pound cakes. (For the record, their recipe uses 6 eggs, 1 cup sugar, which they beat after double boiling, 1 cup flour, 6 tbsp clarified butter, 1 tsp vanilla which they fold in, baked 20-25 minutes at 350ˇ). This sounds much lighter than the cakes we use and is clearly inferior.
Start with an Edna Lewis (Taste of Country Cooking) pound cake.
Cut up the cake into chunks and line a big pyrex bowl with them.
Sprinkle with raspberry framboise.
Add fresh raspberries or good raspberry preserves.
If there are any more cake chunks kind of fill in the cavity with them so you get a kind of bricks and mortar concoction.
According to Candace, this is not quite right. The pieces of pound cake should be covered with jam as they are used to line to bowl, kind of like mortar. Then (or is it before this) they should be soaked with framboise. The interior should not be filled with pound cake pieces like loose rubble, but rather, they should be used to form an inner lining and the creme anglaise should mainly fill the interior cavity. (1995)
Here we have deviated again since they use 3/4 lb raspberries plus 1/4 lb more worked in a food processor and we are willing to use good preserves. They use sherry, we use framboise. However, their recipe for Custard Sauce is what makes the dish and is as follows:
Whisk 6 large egg yolks with 3 tbsp sugar until light and it ribbons when the whisk is lifted. Add in a stream of 1 cup each scalded milk and light cream, stirring, transfer the custard to a heavy sauce pan and cook it over moderately low heat, stirring, until it thickens, but do not let it boil. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in 1 tsp vanilla.
Then chill the custard separately, we pour it over the bricks and mortar of pound cake and preserves. They also finish differently, covering their trifle with heavy cream, chocolate, walnuts and the entire contents of a lava lamp. We sometimes make a pattern with drizzled raspberry, perhaps rings cut to form stars with a knife or we just put some raspberries on it. Neither of these steps are necessary.