If Hades wanted trifle for dessert, this would be it!

Trifle: an angelic concoction of sponge cake, sherry, jelly, sliced peaches, custard and topped with whipped cream, right? Fit for seraphim and cherubim ... the heavenly host probably slurp trifle for lunch. This is probably what the Greeks recognized as "manna from heaven" --

Left: Jim Cherub. Right: Bob Cherub. Cherubim, in plural.
Jim: "What the blitherin' heck is she rabbiting on about?
Bob: "Search me, mate. I wish she'd just shaddap and get to the dessert!" 

But, do angels get all the fun? Don't the other mob, from waaay due south of heaven, need trifle too? What's a self-respecting demon to do without a dish of something sinfully delightful on a special occasion? Luckily, there's something just as delightful as trifle ... on the Dark Side. Sensually sweet without all that goody-goody vanilla and the cloudy, frothy, innocence of pure whipped cream --

Okay: 

Devil's Trifle. We make it for New Year almost every year, and it's time I stopped waxing rhapsodic and gave you the recipe! It's dead simple and you may not believe how good this is (or how nobody came up with it before Jen did, about twelve years ago).

You will need:

A large jar of Morello Cherries (You can use an equivalent amount of fresh cherries, plus a cup of any dark fruit juice. Jarred cherries work just as well and are available year-round. They're also a hulluva lot cheaper.)

A large chocolate sponge roll, or an equivalent amount of any spongy chocolate cake

A port wine flavored jelly mix (Americans, you'll be calling it jello; don't worry, it's the same thing. You can use black grape, or even blackberry flavor ... port wine is best)

A glass of sweet sherry (or brandy, Drambuie, Bailey's etc., etc.  ... booze is entirely optional)

50-100g (2-3oz) of good quality milk chocolate (you can use dark chocolate, if you like the tang and zest of something a little bitter amid all the sweetness. Also, you can use orange or peppermint chocolate for an added zing.)

A cup-and-a half of whipping cream

Custard powder mix -- you'll need about 4 tablespoons

Drinking chocolate powder (not baking chocolate., ie. cocoa powder)

Chocolate sprinkles (optional -- see below)

500mls /about a pint of milk (fat free milk, if you prefer: makes nooo difference, and will cut some of the calories out of this "energy bomb." Be warned: this dish is so easy to eat, you could inhale the whole thing in a single-handed act of self-indulgence, and look around for more.)

Not Jen's granny's trifle dish ... but similar.

...and a big dish or bowl, or even a glass baking dish, to set the whole trifle in. An actual trifle dish is ideal, but they're not so common in this age of frozen, prepackaged desserts. If you don't have one, improvise; just be sure to use something where you can easily get the trifle out of it!

(In fact, we do have a trifle dish, but since it's about 100 years old now (no joke), we don't use it. We actually use a pyrex glass casserole, because it's handy, the right size, and sturdy. The original -- antique, by now -- trifle dish comes down to us as an heirloom from a great-grandmother. It can be traced back in living memory to 1935, but by all accounts was old by then. There's also a damask tablecloth going back to the same era, and we believe both came from Ireland, c. 1900, with a young lass called Mary Armstrong, who was fleeing "the troubles" with her two children, and is Jen's "Irish granny." (Actually, great-grandmother.) Okay, that's enough soap opera, let's get back to the food!

Slice the cake into centimeter / half inch wedges and lay it down all over the bottom of your dish, bowl or casserole. Cut out shapes to fill the empty spaces and pack it down, so there's a good, solid layer of cake in there. When you're happy with the cake, take the optional booze and sprinkle it over, so the cake takes it up. Technically, you can use as much as you like, but don't over-saturate the cake, or you'll wind up with sludge in the bottom of the dish. Delicious sludge, but it can look rather ... gross ... as you ladle it out.

Drain the cherries well -- keep the liquid. Don't quaff it for the pleasure of drinking sweet cherry juice, because you're going to need it. If you're using fresh cherries, organize a cup of dark fruit juice right now. Lay the cherries out evenly, all over the cake.

Break up the bar of chocolate into small bite size pieces and add these in among the cherries. Keep back a small wedge of the chocolate for grating over the top at the end of the construction.

Make up the jelly mixture with just enough boiling water to get the crystals to dissolve properly -- then top it off with the cold liquid from the jar of cherries (see?). Add cold water to get to something like 500mls / ~17oz, or as the jelly mix indicates. Taste it. Sweet enough?? Depending on the tartness of the liquid from the cherries, or other fruit juice, you might need to add a dab of sugar (or stevia, monk's fruit, whatever you use to save on calories). The jelly should be quite cool -- doesn't have to be cold, cool is fine...

Carefully ladle the jelly mixture over the cake and fruit, so everything is covered.  Put the whole shebang in the fridge for a few hours to set the jelly.

When you're happy with the set of the jelly ... let's put the rest of this baby together!

Make up about two cups of custard, using DOUBLE the given instructions as per powder, plus the milk, and adding plenty of drinking chocolate (not unsweetened cocoa powder! If baking chocolate is all you have ... add sweetener, or your chocolate custard will double as poison) to turn boring, boring vanilla custard into chocolate custard. Check the sweetness of the custard at this point. Many custard powders give instructions which make custard that ain't "commercially" sweet. You might like to adjust this. When you double the amount of powder to a given volume of milk, you won't get custard: you will get "chocolate concrete." This is fine, it's supposed to happen...

Let the chocolate concrete cool, dump it into a mixing bowl, add about four tablespoons of whipping cream, and hit this with a stick-mixer (or else put the whole "custard disaster" into the blender and mix till smooth). The result is an amazing, "stand up for itself" custard that, chilled, can be carved. (Yep, you can use the vanilla version of this to make vanilla slices. Or this, to make chocolate custard slices...)

Lay the custard on top of the cherries in huge blobs, and work it gently into the corners. Fill the whole space evenly and level it off. You can add chocolate sprinkles to this layer -- if the trifle is to be dished up immediately, they'll keep their "crunch," and give an extra "wow" to the dish. If the trifle is to be kept till later, leave out the sprinkles, since they almost dissolve in a couple of hours.

While the custard was cooling, you cunningly used the time to whip about a cup-and-a-half of cream, with "drinking chocolate powder to taste." (Repeating, don't use "cocoa powder," which is baking chocolate (bitter) ... or if you must use baking chocolate, add a healthy amount of sweetener.  You can have it medium chocolaty, or incredibly chocolaty. Your call. Start with two tablespoons of the drinking chocolate, and go from there. Get the cream good and stiff: it has to stand up for itself... Spoon the cream on top of the custard and work it into a nice, level layer, even throughout. Grate the last wedge of chocolate over the top...

...and you're done. It should serve 8 - 12, though Dave -- with the marathon cyclist's appetite -- has been known to inhale a quarter of it in one sitting  and say, "Delicious!" It also keeps perfectly in the fridge for up to three days.

Devil's Trifle! Enjoy!

Saving the world -- one chocolate bar at a time

Always check out the inside of the wrapper on the chocolate bar. Mostly they're blank, but the really good ones have a story to tell; and it's a game-changer. A "save the planet" story that might not make it into the next Iron Man or Captain America movie, but ... it ain't all that bad. I love this stuff:

Alter Eco oganic chocolate ... the inside story. So cool.

Alter Aco's "Burnt Caramel" flavor ... yum. Seriously.

As I began -- saving the planet, one chocolate bar at a time. I did actually follow their link and touch town on their website. This is really cool stuff, and wouldn't have been imagined back at the millennium. Okay, the product is about a buck more expensive than the usual Nestle, Cadbury, Lindt or Whittacker product, but what the hey? Consider the extra buck a donation -- or even "paying forward" to the future. I'm not so old (yet!) that I don't sometimes wonder if I'll be slipping into a Darth Vader (TM) style breathmask to trundle down to the stores, when I'm as old as Mom is now --

They'll also be making them in pastel shades, tiffany design, paisley embossing, scented with roses and lavender to woo the little old ladies of the day; of whom I shall be one --

Stop laughing.  It's a sobering thought, n'est-ce pas?

LEFT: not the Lady Sith you were thinking of. That's Lady Sif. Somewhat different. And not that I'll expect to look this way at 87, but you get the picture. Just stick a frizzy-perm gray mop on top of this Bright Young Thing and add a walking frame. Better yet, cram the helmet on and leap aboard the scooter ... which will be starlight black with airbrush stormtroopers. Possibly even with a hover mode, with which to frighten the locals, he he he. (I've been hanging out with Dave way too long.)

Or ... we can just save the planet one chocolate bar at a time, and actually be able to breathe in thirty years' time.

Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea. And having said all of the above, I think I'll sign out with Freddie Mercury and Queen, I'm Going Slightly Mad...

AWOL ... and I didn't go fishing!

I've been gone from this blog for a few days, and I wish I could relate that I've been on a fantastic holiday ... Dave and I went to Fiji, lay on the beach drinking coconut punch, chartered a sailboat and cruised the outer islands, worked on our tan while we took an indescribable bus into the hills and fossicked through the local markets, trying their traditional food and listening to bands nobody ever heard of...

Well, I could write all that. It would certainly make for a great post -- and people would be wondering why I didn't share the pictures.

And the reason would be, because we didn't go to Fiji. I had a Very Major Migraine. People too often dismiss migraine as just a really bad headache, but the fact is, it's a lot more. It is a really bad headache ...  plus nausea, and the shivers of hypothermia while sweat pours out of you; plus dizziness, tachycardia, disorientation, light- and sound- sensitivity. Basically, you sit in the dark for twelve hours, eyes closed, nursing a whole suite of symptoms and wondering if you're even going to survive. The next day, you contend with the after-effects of the pills, which have some nasty side effects.

On the positive side, I think I might have tracked down at least one of the triggers -- and it's not as simple as saying, "Coffee gives me a migraine," or "chocolate gives me migraine." Both of those statements would be untrue: I can drink a cup of coffee once a week and get no hint of migraine. I can eat a little chocolate now and then and, again, get no hint of migraine...

But what happens when you hitch up a fantastic cup of coffee and some fabulous chocolate cake, eaten at the same time? Uh huh.

And it was fantastic coffee, and fabulous chocolate cake...

...as Dave's phone pic, from his facebook page, demonstrates. We shared the cake, about 70/30, and mine was the small, regular cappuccino; we shared the neat little caramel slice sitting behind the cake there. Dave never has a problem with migraine or even indigestion, but me?

Well, I'd be lying if I didn't admit, I had wondered about the combination -- but I don't remember ever having the chance to put this to the test. So: call this the test, right? Right.

Uh huh. The rest is history. So I guess the best thing to do from here on is to NOT have chocolate and coffee at the same time.

People report all kinds of things as migraine triggers: blue cheese, oranges, jalapeños, balsamic, alcohol, peanuts, onions ... even apples. One could live happily without the majority of items on that list, but, well -- coffee and chocolate is where it starts to smart. Sob.

Or, maybe it was also about the increasing barometric pressure plus coffee and chocolate. So the rule would be: don't eat coffee and chocolate when there's a storm coming in! 

Guess I'll have to experiment a little more.

Monday, right no cue, the screen door was fixed and is now rolling smoothly and silently. Wonderful. The company is Sliderfix, from Panorama, and that's all they do -- fix aberrant sliding glass doors. The job took about 90mins and cost under A$300, all up. Fantastic. So I can't grumble about the door anymore.

Meanwhile, Mom is slowly recovering. I think she's just about over the pneumonia now, and we just have to get her up and moving, get some mobility back, strength in the legs and so on. And get her switched to this liquid codeine we were told about at the pharmacy. Hmm. Turns out, you don't have to choke on horse pills after all -- which is a mercy, because she has swallowing problems, and choking many times per day on pills is how she got the aspirant pneumonia in the first place.

Life trundles on, while the next bank of rainy weather comes up out of the southwest. This morning's blue sky is gone, alas. Dave posted a phone pic from the Onkaparinga River mouth about an hour ago, but when I look out the front windows it's GRAY. It looks like RAIN.

Looks like an afternoon for curling up with a good book (or any kind of book), and wondering when this winter will end. Two warm days last week had us speculating about the probability of an early spring and a hot summer, but all that seems to have gone by --

What we need is a prognosticating groundhog. But, since this is Australia, of course it would have to be a marsupial groundhog, and he'd have to come out of his burrow on August 2nd, look around and see if he can see his shadow. Then he can tell us we're in for four more weeks of crap till spring actually gets here on September 1.