Category Archives: Pudding

A tale of two trifles

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We don’t, really, have trifles in Italy. The nearest we come is cassata but although that can, technically, mean a layering of sponge, fruit, liqueur etc, it usually means an ice cream layered dessert. That said, the second trifle here is called Italian trifle, in our house, by my partner. I’m not sure why but it is.

So, here, I present two trifles, although neither are the classic trifle in that neither house any jelly at all. They both also contain booze so not really child-suitable (I should point out that it’s unlawful to give alcohol to a child under the age of five, unless under the direction of a doctor). Although I do have some friends whose children – over the age of five, ahem – absolutely devoured the Italian trifle off their mother’s plate and she had to wrestle the spoon back off them.

The first is a Nigel Slater recipe that he called the Ten Minute Trifle. I’m afraid I don’t have a photograph of it at present. It is glorious. I have since renamed it the Pregnancy Test Trifle since I credit it with being able to detect if you’re pregnant, even before you know you are.

Let me explain. In late 2002 we decided to try for a baby. Three days after ‘trying’ for a baby for the very first time, I made this trifle, as it was New Year’s Eve. I had made it many, many times before. I tasted it. And spat it out. “I’ve put far too much alcohol in here,” I said to my partner, with upper lip ruffled up in distaste. “I must have put double the amount of sherry into it.”

He tasted it. Declared it fine. But to me, it was inedible. It was another three weeks before I did a pregnancy test which declared that I was, indeed, pregnant. Another friend had this trifle and declared it inedible – too strong – and she then discovered she was pregnant.

Despite this. If you’re not pregnant this trifle is lovely. Not too strong at all. If it does taste too strong…well.

Nigel Slater’s Ten Minute Trifle

Note: this trifle contains raw egg and alcohol.

10-20 sponge fingers. You can play quite loose with the quantities as I use enough to fill the bottom of the bowl

255ml chilled marsala or sweet sherry

2 ripe bananas, sliced

1 tin of raspberries. I use the ones in juice

2 eggs, separated

50g caster sugar

225g mascarpone

vanilla extract

flaked almonds

Put the sponge fingers, broken up in half, thirds, whatever and put into a bowl. (Note this is fairly sloppy when you ‘cut’ into it so if such things matter to you you may want to make this in individual bowls/glasses, these glasses are particularly good for this.) Pour over the marsala, raspberries (with as much or as little of the tinned-juice as you need to soak the sponge fingers, discard the rest of the juice). Now put the bananas on top.

Cream the egg yolks with the sugar, add the mascarpone and beat until light and creamy. Add a dash of vanilla extract, about a teaspoon.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff and then fold them gently into the egg yolk/mascarpone mixture. Now tip it all over the fruit/sponge fingers and cover with toasted flaked almonds.

Leave it for a couple of hours before eating.

Italian trifle

This is very rich, very delicious and more-ish. I really like trifles (I know some people hate them) because you can make them in advance, as long as you have the fridge space. They are a great, often not madly expensive way of serving dessert to lots of people and if anything, they improve with 24hrs in the fridge. I’ve said before that I am master of organisation, but once people arrive through my front door and I’ve had a drink it’s every man for himself. I am a dreadful hostess. So a dessert, pre-made, that I can present with relish and show that I did, once, care about my guests, is useful.

100g sponge fingers. Absolutely use shop bought don’t even think about making them yourself

100g lemon curd

3 tablespoons of limongello or lemon vodka

500ml of double cream

125g caster sugar

100ml lemon juice. From our normal sized lemons this equals to the juice from one and a half lemons

Topping

250ml whipping cream

Zest of half an orange

Crystallized violets (optional but lovely here)

Shelled, chopped nuts. I use pistachio or toasted hazelnuts. But you can leave this bit out completely.

I make this in a 1litre pudding basin.

Break the sponge fingers in half and spread with the curd. Put them in individual glasses if you like, but this is an impressive dessert to serve in a big dish. And unlike the Pregnancy Test Trifle above, it holds its shape when cut.

Now sprinke the alcohol over the top.

In a medium sized sauce pan pour the 500ml of double cream and add the sugar. Bring to the boil over a medium heat then turn down and simmer for 2/3 minutes. Now remove from the heat and stir through the lemon juice. Pour this over the sponge fingers. In the bowl I use, this takes me almost to the top and I always have a moment of panic but as long as you have a centimetre or so of space, you’ll be fine for putting the cream on later. Push the sponge fingers down into the mixture as best you can.

Leave it out, to cool. When cool put it in the fridge. You can easily do this bit the day before, as I do. Be warned, this is already delicious and often I have a go at this pudding before the day. That’s okay though because you will have a carapace of whipped cream to hide your shame.

Either just before you serve this or when the mixture above has set you whip up the whipped cream. Spoon it over the trifle and scatter with the violet petals/nuts/zest. Either serve or put back in the fridge for enjoyment later.

Rice pudding with salted caramel syrup

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Donna Hay’s chilled rice pudding with caramel. ©donna hay

Rice pudding isn’t something I grew up liking. My mother made it, although hers was more of a rice pudding cake – you could cut big slices of it. It was perfectly nice but not for me.

Then one day I discovered this rice pudding, which was all creamy and vanillay and slow cooked and I was hooked. (The recipe for the actual rice pudding is in the article, the article however refers to oat pudding and I do realise that…)

I am a big fan of Donna Hay. I get her magazine whenever I can find it, and even though she often talks about winter recipes when it’s summer here in the UK (she’s Australian), it’s beautiful and her recipes are amazing. And unlike Martha Stewart Living, the recipes are converted to metric: it’s not all a cup of this or a stick of that.

Anyway. Here is her recipe for Chilled Rice Pudding with Caramel. A few notes.

It’s a helluva lot of milk and cream. I think you could probably get away with not adding the extra lot of cream and milk you add when you take it off the heat. See how you feel. Or add less. I added the full amount and it makes for a very wet and loose pudding.

Delicious, but you can’t really cut into it with a spoon and leave an indentation, as seen in her picture above.

Two: I didn’t use dulce de leche. I use my own secret recipe for salted caramel and I just poured it on ever so slightly warm, I didn’t loosen it with more cream like the recipe suggests, as by that stage, I was starting to fear for my heart.

Even though it’s a chilled pudding, it’s immensely comforting. Here is a picture of my version:

My Plum Crumble

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The name of this recipe is a total lie. It’s not MY plum crumble. But I don’t remember where the recipe came from, and I make it so much that it is, in my head at least, mine. I know I got it in a rush one day because my esteemed friend Wendy was coming round for dinner, to show me her newly bought Aston Martin (as you do). Wendy is a vegetarian and I wanted to prepare dinner with what I had in the house. So I ended up making two things I’d never made before, and that were both magnificent successes. Mercifully, I wrote down the recipe for the plum crumble and have been making it ever since. The other recipe, for butternut squash risotto – which was STUPENDOUS – is lost forever.

Here is the plum crumble. I often use half wholemeal plain flour and half white plain, without noticing any difference other than a more nutty flavour. But as ever with recipes, I’d start off with doing it as it says before experimenting.

700-800g plums, stoned and quartered
175g dark brown soft sugar
a squeeze of lemon
175g plain flour (I now use 75g wholemeal, 100g white)
150g butter, cold and cut into pieces
50g porridge oats (as in the flakes, not pinmeal)

Quarter the plums and put into a dish about…hmmm. I use a Le Creuset dish that holds 1.6l. This pudding serves about 6-8 so you know, just kinda guess. The plums should fit snugly across the bottom.

Squeeze the lemon over the top, add two tablespoons of the sugar and 125ml of water.  Mix around so all the plums are coated.

Now in a food processor, mix up the flour and rest of the sugar. Especially if you’re using that soft brown sugar that clumps together. Now add the butter and pulse for a few seconds, and finally the oats. Pulse briefly until starting to clump together.

Put over the plums evenly. Put the dish on a baking dish (in case the plums ooze their juice all over the oven floor) and cook at 190C for about 40 minutes until all nice and brown.

This is obviously delicious, but I feel the need to point it out anyway, with custard, cream or a little vanilla ice cream. If home made, so much the better. I do kid myself that it’s good for you, as it’s fruit and the topping has oats (I conveniently forget the sugar). You can reheat it in the microwave, it doesn’t harm the topping too much. I just find this crumble really warming and satisfying and generally, spirt lifting. But I may give my puddings too much importance.

I don’t have a picture. Sorry.

Ice cream cake

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Very yummy ice cream cake

When I used to go to Italy, up to Salsomaggiore Terme, provincia di Parma, where my father is from, we used to go to Pasticceria Tosi on Sunday to buy little cakes and pastries (a very common tradition in Italy). In the fridge/freezer display there would always be ice cream cakes.

They seemed impossibly luxurious and I can still see myself looking in at them.

When I saw this recipe by Bill Granger in the August edition of Waitrose magazine, I knew I had to try it (unfortunately I can’t find a link to it on the Waitrose site). He calls it tiramisu ice cream cake. Of course, being Italian, I cannot call it this.

I adapted it quite a bit, halving the proportions, adding more sponge fingers, less chocolate and taking out the Kahlua that Granger asks for (I haven’t got any in my cupboard and I’m not going to spend £17 on a bottle of it to keep in said cupboard, but if you have some, do use it, maybe half and half marsala or all Kahlua, up to you). I know this recipe may seem imprecise, but the beauty of it is that you can add more or less of something you like/don’t like.

This is what I did:

65ml espresso/strong black coffee
30ml marsala (or use sherry)
Nearly a whole packet of sponge fingers (about 170g)
Some vanilla ice cream, I used about half of one batch of this home made stuff
About 50g of grated dark chocolate

I lined a small loaf tin (about 6″ x 4″) with some parchment paper. Then I started layering up the dessert.

Mix the coffee and marsala together in a small dish. Individually dip the sponge fingers into it. Don’t linger or they will fall apart. Lay the fingers down on the base of the dish, break some up if they don’t fit but end up with a base of soaked sponge fingers.

Now layer with vanilla ice cream, then grated chocolate. Grating chocolate is possibly one of my least favourite jobs EVER, as the chocolate ends up going everywhere and sticking to the grater. So I didn’t use loads, you can use more if you like. I probably should have used my grater attachment on my food processor, but I don’t like to use it for what I consider small jobs..

Then  just keep going. Dip the sponge fingers in the mixture, ice cream, grated chocolate. Until you run out of space. I ended up with a layer of sponge fingers as I like them, Granger says to end up with a sprinkling of chocolate.

Cover with cling film and put in the freezer. Take out for about 30 mins before you need it and keep it in the fridge. It slices beautifully and my eldest loved it (although I need to point out that it DOES HAVE ALCOHOL IN IT and it is ILLEGAL TO GIVE ALCOHOL TO A CHILD UNDER THE AGE OF FIVE). I gave my youngest a separate bit with no booze in it.

Afterwards it struck me that if you preferred you could layer these up individually in little ramekins or some lovely little glasses and freeze them individually.

If making for a large party, double the recipe above and use a big old square tin. Granger recommends 26″ square but use your common sense. No reason you couldn’t make this in a loaf tin like I did just a bigger one.

An easy summer dessert

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My summer dessert special. If you come to my house during berry season, this is likely what you’ll get.

This is, actually, really, a dessert I invented myself. You can tell by just how imprecise everything is. It was probably borne out of that great motivator: greed.

This is what you need:

Some amaretti biscuits

Mascarpone, you need about 1-2 tablespoons per person depending on size of glass.

Some yoghurt

Lemon curd

Some berries

Some icing sugar

Some pretty glasses

Long spoons

 

Crush the amaretti biscuits. Whip up the mascarpone with the yoghurt and lemon curd – to taste. I tend to have a 60/30/10 split mascarpone/yoghurt/lemon curd. And when I say whip up, I mean just kinda loosen it with a fork until it’s all homogenised.

Take some of the berries and whizz them up in a liquidiser with the icing sugar. Just a tablespoon or so of the icing sugar! This is for the syrupy part.

Then you just layer everything, a layer of crushed biscuits, a layer of fruit, layer of the mascarpone mixture, a bit of the syrup repeat, etc. The syrup makes things really tasty, so don’t skimp on it. I like to end up with a  sprinkling of the amaretti or some chopped hazelnuts on top of a top layer of the mascarpone mixture.

You can make these in advance and bring them out at the end. With a flourish.

 

Oat pudding, or porridge pudding, in the style of rice pudding

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I ate all of the strip missing just waiting for it to cool.

I recently discovered a really lovely, easy, recipe for a rice pudding that is simple but creamy without being laden with too much fat or sugar  (on the Waitrose site). Every time we have too much milk in the house I make it. I love having a pudding you can so easily heat up, and yet is so comforting in the house.

But I still felt slightly guilty eating it, mostly cos of the pudding rice which is hardly the world’s most nutritious food stuff. And then I thought what would happen if I made it with coarse cut oatmeal, which is low in fibre, said to lower cholesterol and generally add 10 years to your life? This was also borne out of the fact that I love porridge, but often can’t be arsed to make it first thing, especially not the ‘really good’ kind that takes ten minutes of stirring (sorry, not interested in cooking porridge in the microwave).

So I tried it with oats – coarse cut oatmeal – and I love it. The incredibly slow cooking makes it taste really creamy, even though it’s only using semi skimmed milk. And the bay leaves and vanilla give it an incredible flavour, without adding calories. I guess you could try to do it with half water/half milk (how I make my porridge on the stove top) and I might try to cut the sugar down a teensy bit more. But I wouldn’t play with this too much, because it’s actually very good. I take a slice of a morning, heat it up in the microwave, add fruit if I want to, or seeds, and in under two minutes you’ve got ace porridge.

If you don’t like porridge or rice pudding, there’s little chance you’ll like this. If you do though, give this a try and let me know what you think.

600ml semi skimmed milk
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
2 bay leaves (i use dried)
A sprinkling of sea salt
50g coarse cut oatmeal (or pudding rice if you want to make this into rice pudding, in which case up the sugar to 3 tablespoons and omit the salt)
2 tablespoons caster sugar
2 tablespoons of flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 150C. Put the milk, vanilla extract and the bay leaves (tear them a little) into a saucepan and heat until almost boiling. Remove from the heat and leave to cool a little.

Lightly grease a 1.3L shallow oven proof dish. For ease (until the milk is absorbed this can spill), I put the dish on a baking tray. Scatter the oatmeal, salt and sugar around the dish. Then strain the milk over the top (discard the bay leaves).

Cover with foil and bake for one hour. After an hour, remove the foil, stir, cover with the foil again and cook for another 30 mins.

After this, remove the foil, sprinkle the almonds on top and then put back into the oven (uncovered, you’re done with the foil now), for another 30 mins. If your oven has a ‘top oven’ function, use it. I use it at this point – for the last half hour – to brown the top.

Eat. Enjoy. It’s porridge, but not as you know it.