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Trifle
Cut stale cake into slices and spread preserves between them. Lay in a deep dish and heap full of whipped cream.
A three-line trifle with no quantities at all, which is the point: it is a way of using cake that has gone dry. A few decisions are left to you.
- What cake worksPlain butter cake, pound cake or sponge, at least a day old. Very moist cakes and anything heavily iced will collapse into paste under the cream; scrape off buttercream before slicing.
- Slice thicknessAbout half an inch. Thinner slices tear when you spread jam on them, thicker ones stay dry in the middle.
- The preserves do the moisteningThere is no custard or wine here, so the jam is the only wet element. Warm it slightly and thin it with a spoonful of water or fruit juice so it spreads rather than drags, and use it generously.
- Sherry, if you want itMany period trifles soaked the cake in sherry, madeira or fruit syrup before assembling. This version omits it, but two or three tablespoons brushed over the slices will moisten a dry cake.
- Whipped creamWhip to soft peaks rather than stiff; roughly a cup of heavy cream, whipped with a tablespoon of sugar and a little vanilla, will cover a small dish. Stiff cream sits on top like a lid instead of settling into the layers.
- Let it standAssemble, cover and refrigerate an hour or two so the jam softens the crumb. Left much longer, the cream may begin to weep.
- YieldA deep dish built from a few slices of cake will probably serve 4 to 6, spooned out down through the layers.
Trifle in English cookery began in the sixteenth century as a flavoured thickened cream, and only later acquired the cake, the wine and the fruit that define it now; by the Victorian period it was commonly a layered dish of soaked sponge, custard, preserves and whipped cream, and grand versions were often built in footed glass bowls so the strata showed. This one is stripped back to its thriftiest form: the whole apparatus of trifle turns out to be an excellent excuse for cake nobody wanted to eat plain. Dry cake was a routine problem in a kitchen that baked weekly and had no plastic wrap.