On the eighth day of Christmas On the Tudor Trail gave to me the chance to win your choice of book from Claire Ridgway’s history collection! Click here to browse her wonderful collection.

To be in the running to win this book, leave a comment after this post.

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Then simply leave a comment after this post between now and 31 December 2017. Don’t forget to leave your name and a contact email. Please note that I have comment moderation activated and need to ‘approve’ comments before they appear. There is no need to submit your comment twice.

This giveaway is open internationally.

One winner will be randomly selected and contacted by email shortly after the competition closes. Please ensure you’ve added natalie@onthetudortrail.com to your address book to avoid missing my email.

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A Christmas Trifle

By Claire Ridgway

Thank you to Natalie for inviting me to be part of her 12 Days of Christmas Mega Book Giveaway, it’s wonderful to be a part of this. I thought I’d share with you today one of my favourite family Christmas traditions: the Christmas trifle.

When I was growing up, we always had the traditional British Christmas dinner – turkey with all the trimmings, followed by Christmas pudding and brandy sauce – and I was always too full to enjoy the spread that my mum would lay out in the evening. There was no way I could manage cheese, ham, quiche, sandwiches, pies, sausage rolls, salad…. But, as you will know, every British person has an extra stomach, we have a ‘pudding tummy’. However full we are of savoury dishes, we can generally manage a sweet treat. One minute we are saying how ‘stuffed’ we are and that we won’t be able to eat for at least a week, and then as we spot the dessert menu or someone wafts a yummy pudding in front of us we suddenly experience new hunger pangs. One tummy is full but the pudding tummy is empty and hungry. My pudding tummy was always ready and waiting for my mum’s trifle! I’d ignore the rest of the spread and head straight for the Christmas trifle, that would be my tea, I didn’t need anything else.

“What is a trifle?”, you may ask. Well, this trifle certainly is not “a thing of little value or importance” (one definition of the word), this “trifle” is “a cold dessert of sponge cake and fruit covered with layers of custard, jelly, and cream” (Google dictionary). It’s a traditional British pud. The bottom layer tends to be sponge, and this is either soaked in sherry or a fruity jelly (jello) which can be fruit flavoured or have fruit, such as strawberries, raspberries or slices of peach, mixed into it. When the jelly is set, or the sponges have soaked up the sherry, a layer of custard is poured over. Finally, the dessert is topped with whipped cream and decorated with sprinkles. My mum’s tended to be a strawberry or raspberry one, and my favourite layer was always the fruity sponge at the bottom – delicious!

Although these days you can find trifle recipes using panettone or chocolate brownies soaked in various liqueurs, and there are so many twists on the traditional British trifle, Christmas isn’t Christmas for me without the sort of trifle my mum made. It’s simple, it’s light, and it’s yummy. It’s easy to find recipes for traditional British trifles via Google, but here’s what I do:

1. Line the bottom of a large glass serving bowl with trifle sponges or pieces of sponge cake. It doesn’t matter if the sponge cake is slightly stale and this is a good way of using up a left-over sponge cake, muffins, Madeira cake or magdalenas.
2. Optional: Pour a little sherry over the sponges and allow to soak in.
3. Make up the jelly (jello) from cubes or crystals.
4. Optional: Scatter sponges with fruit – you could use sliced bananas, tinned fruit cocktail, tinned peaches, raspberries, strawberries… whatever you like.
5. Pour jelly over the sponges (and fruit). Leave to cool and then refrigerate until set.
6. Make custard however you usually make it – from a packet, from custard powder, or using milk/cream, egg yolks, sugar, cornflour and vanilla. Google “custard recipe” if you need to. Allow to cool. You can cover the custard with cling-film while it cools. This is supposed to prevent a skin from forming but if a skin forms then you just whip it back into the custard.
7. Pour cooled custard over set jelly.
8. Whip up some double cream – You can whip in a little icing sugar to sweeten it if you like. Whip it until it holds its shape (soft peaks).
9. Spoon the cream over the custard layer.
10. Decorate with multi-coloured sprinkles, crushed biscuits, candied fruit, anything you like – this was my job as a child, I used lots of sprinkles!
11. Chill until use.
12. Prepare your pudding tummy and enjoy.

Trivia: The Christmas trifle that I describe above is not a typical Tudor recipe, but it does come from desserts that were served in Tudor times. For example, Gervase Markham’s Tudor recipe for a Norfolk Fool comprised layers of fine manchet bread and a cream and egg yolk mixture (a custard) spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, and in the Stuart recipe “Elizabeth Cromwell’s fool”, Elizabeth Cromwell used a bottom layer of bread soaked in sherry. It appears to have been the forerunner of our sherry trifle. I made a Tudor style fool, and while it wasn’t as light as my mum’s trifle, it was rather nice!

https://youtu.be/mrjSu-uZMaU