Saint Honore Trifle

Somehow, even though I made this week’s selection for the heavenly cake bakers last week, I’m still sitting here at nearly 10pm (scratch that, it’s at least 10:15 by the time this gets posted) on Monday, the day we all post, writing up my post. This week’s selection is the Saint Honore Trifle. The most challenging part of this for me was finding strawberries that were worth eating, let alone paying for. I also didn’t have a trifle dish, so, like Jenn of Knitty Baker, I made it in individual servings.

I started out by quartering the Chiboust cream recipe, and halving the cake. Instead of 2 9×2″ rounds, I made only one. I ended up wrapping the vast majority of it up and stashing it in the freezer. It’ll still be good when strawberries are actually in season here. 😉

This cake starts by mixing warm beurre noisette with vanilla, and keeping that warm. Then you heat your eggs + sugar over a pan of water, then beat the heck out of them. I love this step. It goes from a bright yellow…

…to a fluffy, light, almost white. Magical.

After that, you mix some with the beurre noisette, sift and fold in your dry ingredients, fold it all together and stick it in the oven. One component down. Go wash your dishes while you’re waiting for it to bake. Then come back and make the pastry cream and the syrup, so they can both cool while the cake cools.

So, when you quarter the recipe for the pastry cream, you really start to wonder about your sanity when you dirty the stand mixer again. It works much better with a hand whisk at this point. I know I’m glossing over some steps here, but like I said, I made this a week ago, and don’t really remember how it came together. So, now you have your pastry cream finished, cake out of the oven, and syrup made. Oh look, bread’s done, too. When did that happen?

Now, if I remember correctly, is when you whip up some cream, fold in the pastry cream, de-stem and wash your strawberries, after composting the ones that went icky on the way here from California, then assemble. Oh, wait. There’s a little matter of spun sugar first.

I chickened out and decided not to make the spun sugar, but I did make caramel doodads. Marginally less messy. Sill rather pointy, though. Jenn learned that the hard way by stabbing herself in the pinkie finger. I hope it heals quickly, Jenn! I did end up with a bit of “spun” sugar stuck to my measuring cup.

Ok, NOW we assemble. I made mine in 4 ice cream sundae cups. I thought they actually looked kinda cute, like they came out of a 50s diner, sitting on the awful old counter top in our kitchen. I can hardly wait to get rid of it.

My husband’s only complaint was that while he liked the flavour of the doodads, he thought they were “kinda sharp”. Loved the Chiboust cream, though. He suggested making something similar with ice cream, topped with the Chiboust cream, and leaving out the cake! I don’t really blame him, considering the way I broke it up into chunks to do the layering, but we could hardly call it one of Rose’s Heavenly Cakes, if we left out the cake. 😉