Country Girls - The Trifle - II

Preparations for my big weekend are continuing.  My main accomplishment is having done the grocery shopping. For someone who lives just a few miles from the center of the free world, mundane things like grocery shopping are a real chore.  First off I have to get in my car.  I don't commute in my car so that means I have to have come home, eaten dinner, changed clothes and gone back out again.  After a long day at work it's easy to get settled in and think "I'll go tomorrow."

But, I got out and got most of the ingredients over the weekend, and polished off the last on Wednesday. A big thing was eggs. Between the cake, which took several eggs and today's custard auce I've gone through nearly a dozen eggs. I'm not sure if today's project - Mint Creme Anglaise - came out right, so I may get to do it again. We'll see.

The sauce starts off with milk. You heat it with mint leaves, to a boil, and then let it sit 30 minutes. Pretty easy!

After the milk has cooled you strain the mint leaves out and use the spoon to press the leaves extracting any last mintyness.
 
Then you mix egg yolks and sugar together, heat the milk back up and mix the eggs and the milk together. This is the hard part.  It's all too easy to cook the eggs when you put them into the hot milk and the you have scrambled milk. Ugh.

The fun part is in the bottle. My second shopping trip was to the liquor store where I got Creme de Menthe, Sherry, and some Irish Cream.
 
The Creme de Menthe and the Sherry will go into the trifle dessert.
 
The Irish Cream is for my guests to sip as we discuss "The Country Girls."
 
 
 
 
The always helpful Dan sampled some of the Creme de Menthe for me, so I'd be sure it's good.  It was a shot for him and a shot for the sauce as we added it in.
 

I'm waiting for the sauce to cool to see how it looks.  It was looking a little curtly and I'm afraid I may have failed on adding the eggs into the milk.  I guess it's a case where practice will make perfect.