Poached pear trifle
This trifle is a beautiful booze-soaked delight, made with a mulled wine base and finished with fresh homemade custard!
Ingredients
(Serves 8)
For the mulled wine base:
500ml good red wine150g sugar6 cloves100ml orange juice1 sticks cinnamon1 star anise½ cut and split vanilla pod
For rest of trifle:
3 firm Williamss pears, peeled2 peeled granny smith apples100g frozen cranberries or a punnet of fresh redcurrants or blackberries3 whole peeled clementines or satsumas pulled into segments5 leaves of gelatine (or agar agar follow packet instructions to set 500ml)Approx 15 x sponge fingers (or sponge cut into chunks, this recipe also works well with Madeira cake slices)425ml thick custard (see recipe at bottom of page to make your own)150g soft mascarpone350ml whipping cream only half whipped1 tbsp icing sugar100g white chocolate20g dark chocolate (optional)Mint leaves to garnish. (optional)
Method
First make the mulled wine base. Heat a large saucepan and add the sugar and all remaining ingredients, add a splash of the wine just to cover and simmer rapidly so mixture is of a syrupy consistency.
Next add the pears, the remaining red wine, then bring to a simmer and cover with a disc of grease proof paper and simmer the pears until just soft - this will take around 12 minutes.
Remove from the heat and remove the pears and ingredients and set aside in a container.
Place the gelatine leaves in cold water to soften then take 500ml of the mulled wine and drain through a sieve into a clean pan. Warm up on the hob and squeeze the excess water from the gelatine and stir into mulled wine until dissolved then remove from heat.
Chop the poached pears into even bite size chunks along with the apple and place with the blackberries and clementine segments into the base of a roughly sized 20cm/8inch trifle/pudding bowl.
Squeeze over the juice of half a lemon, mix the fruit with your hands then lay over sponge fingers to roughly cover the fruit then pour over mulled wine/jelly. Cover with cling film and set in fridge for 1 and a half hours or until jelly is set.
Spread custard to cover the jelly, fruit and sponge, then using a whisk fold the mascarpone and icing sugar with the soft whipped cream until smooth. Place into a piping bag and pipe peaks all over the custard.
Finally grate the white chocolate all over and add a touch of dark grated chocolate too if you desire. When serving garnish with fresh mint leaves for extra colour and dig in!
Thick basic custard recipe (or you can use a good ready made one)
Ingredients:
4 egg yolks1 dsp corn flour25g castor sugar425ml whipping cream1 tsp vanilla extract
Method:
Whisk the egg yolks with the corn flour and sugar.
Warm the milk and vanilla and pour over eggs and whisk so the mixture combines. Put back into a clean pan and cook on the hob stirring constantly until mixture thickens.
Remove from heat pour into bowl and use as required.