On track?

Not sure what happened, but I haven’t blogged for a while. I have been doing something with my time. If you follow me on Instagram (all 2 people who fit in that crossover) you may have noticed this.

At the beginning of September I started tracking my making of projects. Not anything huge, I just am making an effort to spend at least 10 minutes everyday making something, being creative.  Mostly this has been a crochet blanket, but it has also meant the Black Forest trifle, a rag rug and an assortment of paper projects from a magazine. I have been taking pictures and tagging them as #10minutes of making. Which, strangely, was not already taken.  

I seem to be building a good habit, except that I didn’t yesterday.  But I thought that I probably wouldn’t- we went to dinner at a friend’s in the evening and in order to build up his strength G spent most of the day sleeping- he has been sick and is still lacking stamina.  

It is very helpful to track this, and to try to create the ongoing habit.

Trifle!

I made a Black Forest trifle for a 70s themed lunch.  I decided on that after perusing various 70s recipes and realising that I don’t like  a lot of food from that era, and don’t know how to make a lot of it.  But a trifle based on a cake popular then- can do.  There are a lot of recipes on the Internet, but not a lot of consistency. 

 So I made it up.  I bought a lot of the elements pre made, because it was easier, but they could be made.

I started with a chocolate Swiss roll, from the supermarket.  I think a chocolate sponge would also work, but there were no plain sponges at the supermarket.  One recipe I saw suggested brownies.  The cake was cur into slices, and covered with some cherry jam.

I then put some bottled morello cherries, some of the syrup from the cherries and some cherry liquor in a saucepan with a little bit of sugar and boiled it, to try and make a thicker cherry section. It didn’t thicken, but it boiled away a lot of the alcohol.  Next time I might try kirsch (we used heering cherry liquor).

I then put the cherries on top of the cake

For the custard I wanted chocolate custard, but didn’t want to make it from scratch. So we bought ready made custard, the nice local farm brand!  I put that on the stove on a low heat, and while it was heating I melted some dark chocolate (a large bar so probably 180-200 grams) and then whisked it into the custard. It was a little bitter, but the rest of the trifle was so sweet, it worked and by the next day didn’t taste as bitter.

I then chopped up some milk chocolate and scattered it on the custard with some more cherries. If you do this, warn people before they eat that there are chocolate chunks in there, otherwise they think it is a cherry stone.

I put it in the fridge overnight. In the morning I whipped some cream and covered it with grated milk chocolate.

It was delicious- this may be a go to Christmas dessert now.  Very chocolatey.