Country Girls - The Trifle

The upcoming weekend is a biggie for me. My sister is coming this weekend to attend the Jon Stewart rally, and to visit with us.  I'm having a small party for her and her friends who live here as well as our good friends Dan and Jeanette on Saturday.  On Sunday Jack and Emily are coming to brunch. Then in the afternoon my book club is coming.

That's a lot of cooking! I've had the menu planned for several weeks now.

• Saturday (post rally) - Tailgate Chili Pie, Salad, Cornbread, So'Mores Cupcakes
• Sunday (brunch) - California Strata, Fruit Salad, Cookies
• Sunday (book club) - English trifle, Scones, Tea, Irish Cheese, Sherry

My first order of business is to get the Trifle started.  They mention Trifle in the book we're reading "The Country Girls" by Edna O'Brien.

I started the whole thing off, as I do most projects by looking in my cookbooks. I ended up using a cookbook that I have mixed feelings about -

The "New Basics" is a cookbook that is not always my friend.  Sometimes things come out fine, other times they don't. In this case I chose them because the only other recipe for trifle I have was in Fanny Farmer, which I will say is reliable, but I didn't like the filing they used.  So, I chose this recipe, knowing that the end result may be un-predictable.  It's actually a two-part project.  First you make the cake, a sponge cake, then you put it into the trifle.  Fanny Farmer notes that it's a good recipe if you have stale cake.  Cake doesn't usually hang around my place long enough to get stale so I'm baking my own.  Maybe I'll leave it out a few days so it gets stale.

Once the cake is made then you put it into the trifle, but that's not for today.

The recipe calls for eggs and whipped egg whites. Not unexpectedly my hand-held battery operated beater wasn't charged. So out came old faithful - The hand turned beater is good for the biceps. I beat and I beat and I beat and eventually I did get my egg whites fluffed up.

Then you fold the fluffy whites into a mixture of the egg yolks, that you separated from the whites earlier, and sugar.  You sift flour into this in four rounds until you have a very yellow fluffy batter.

I got jammed up because I got the egg whites started in the large mixing bowl and the egg yolks in the little, but in the end you put everything into the egg yolks.  It was a bit of a tight fit in this little bowl, but since all you do is fold things in it worked out.

I put the batter into a buttered and floured spring pan and slid it into the oven.

Thirty minutes later I have a lovely sponge cake that I'm going to let get stale so it will suck all the sherry up in the trifle pan.