Irish Coffee Trifle, Dessert of the Gods

Ooh, pretty, wow...

A trifle is a wonderful thing. What's funny is if you look up the definition for trifle, you will find that it means "an article or thing of very little value." This definition could not be further from what I believe a trifle to be. Either the name of the dessert needs to change, or the definition of the word trifle does. To me, a trifle is a dessert of the utmost value. A trifle is what you serve when you have a fancy party. Or a family get-together, in this case.

I sneak a bite and nephew eyes his next spoonful.

Sunday evening brought yet another family dinner for my crazy clan. Mom had us make our own pizzas, and I brought this Irish Coffee Trifle for dessert. I had the idea because I still had all of the ingredients for the Irish Coffee Cupcakes, I had all the ingredients for some chocolate pudding (not to mention whole milk that needed to be used up), Irish Cream liqueur, and some whipping cream that needed to be used. All of this sounded to me like the makings of a trifle.

Served up nice and pretty.

What I love about trifle is that it is pretty difficult to mess up. As long as you have some good cake, a good pudding, and some whipping cream, you can pull together a trifle. I also love how it allows me to be creative. I can use any cake, any custard, any liqueur- heck, I could even add fruit or candy if I wanted! The possibilities are endless!

I will eat the whole thing if nobody stops me.

To make my trifle, I used my Irish Coffee Cupcake recipe (just the cupcakes), my chocolate pudding recipe (the good one), some leftover ganache from the Irish Coffee Cupcakes (melted), and some whipping cream. To make the whipping cream, I beat about 1 1/2 cups of heavy cream with 3 or 4 teaspoons of white sugar on high speed with a hand mixer until stiff peaks formed.

The lineup.

To assemble the trifle, I started with 6 of the cupcakes, quartered, and broke them up and laid them in the bottom of my trifle dish. Next, I sprinkled 4 teaspoons of Irish Cream liqueur over the cake, and dropped some globs of melted ganache on top of that. Next, I spread half of my pudding over top of the cake layer. Then, I spread half of the whipped cream on top of the pudding. I then repeated the whole process with the cake, liqueur, ganache, pudding, and whipped cream. Finally, I used a vegetable peeler to shave some semi-sweet chocolate on top of the trifle to make it look fancy. I think I succeeded.

You know you want some...