Luxury Leftovers Trifle

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

Christmas pudding, Christmas cake or stale sponge (or a combination of them)

Leftover poached fruits (or fresh fruit if you wish) Cream sherry

Cognac or rum

For the custard

500ml double cream 250ml milk

Six egg yolks

100g sugar

One vanilla pod, split 200ml cream, whipped

Method

In a saucepan (or ideally a bain marie) combine the milk, cream and sugar. Split the vanilla pod lengthwise and, using the blade of a knife, scrape out the tiny black seeds and add, with the two halves of the pod, to the cream and milk mixture. Bring gradually to the boil and take off the heat immediately.

Now whisk the egg yolks in a bowl. Take some of the hot cream and milk mixture (about a quarter of its volume) and pour over the egg yolks, mixing thoroughly. Pour this mixture back into the bain marie or saucepan, whisking constantly. Put it back on the heat and, still whisking, let the mixture thicken as it heats.

As soon as it has thickened, pour the custard into a bowl and cool it rapidly. You might like to have a very large bowl partially filled with ice cubes standing by; you can then plunge the smaller bowl containing the custard into it for rapid temperature reduction.

As the custard is cooling, you need to make up the pudding / cake / sponge mixture. If you have any leftover poached fruits the commonest being pears, oranges and prunes that have been treated with a generous quantity of Armagnac add them. If you don’t have any, don’t worry. Use fresh but very ripe bananas instead or just soften some pear slices in syrup. This is not an exact trifle; the whole point is to turn leftovers into something delicious and part of that transformation is achieved by that lovely, rich custard. The rest is done by alcohol.

Take a large bowl and put your leftover cake/pudding and leftover poached fruits into it and mix. Moisten thoroughly with plenty of sweet sherry and a splash of Cognac or rum.

Now, all you have to do is to spoon alternating layers of this boozy, dark mixture with layers of the custard. It’s best, by far, to do this in a glass bowl where you can see the layers building up; they make a lovely pattern.

When all the layers are in place leave your trifle to settle in a cool place for a while and whisk some cream for the topping. Before serving, spread the whipped cream as the top and final layer and sprinkle with toasted flaked almonds or toasted coconut. Or you could always use what’s left of your hundreds-and-thousands.