Such a dessert could be called a countertop-sweeper, but it’s more formally known as a trifle: one of those Great British recipes with an evocative name, joining the ranks of the Eton mess, the fool and the stargazey pie.
Turns out, there’s something similar on this side of the pond. Across America’s South, there is tipsy cake. Like a trifle, it contains fruit or jam, booze, custard and some kind of cake. According to Stella Parks, author of the upcoming “BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts” (W.W. Norton, fall 2017): “Tipsy cakes are very casual. They are not even layered — just dump the cake in the bowl.” But unlike trifles, she says, original tipsy cakes of the mid-1800s were always finished with blanched, slivered almonds.
A tipsy trifle — a mash-up of the two — was my goal. But which kind of cake to start with? This year, I had pound cake, but I gave serious consideration to using a plateful of pistachio snowball cookies. Any sponge cake, pound cake or panettone will do, even better when the cake’s a little stale. It is cubed and then sprinkled — never soaked or doused — with a combination of brandy and sweet wine or sherry. If the wine is dry and not sweet, “just add a spoonful of sugar,” Parks says.
The custard can be rich or light. Parks’s tipsy-cake research found 19th-century cookbooks that called for a custard made from “one to four eggs per cup of liquid.” For children, cooks were encouraged to use “fewer eggs and yellow food coloring, and it will look as though it were made with the bounty of a dozen eggs.” This, I think, gives us permission to make a custard based on the eggs and dairy in the house. We can skip the food coloring. To gild the lily, top the tipsy trifle with a cloud of whipped cream. You can substitute yogurt, sour cream or crème fraîche if all the cream was used in the custard.
