Grandchildrens Trifle

This tastes good-really good-give it a go

Grandchildren’s Trifle.


This uses up windfalls, fills up itinerant grandchildren, and you can assemble it it minutes.

Ingredients

1carton ready made custard( Vanilla from Waitrose is good)1 jam Swiss roll, Stewed apples-about five large cooking apples, no water, and very little sugar .

Visiting tinies look forward to a pud. The bribery potential is important. I don’t actually say that clean plates are a qualification for afters. I just leave the trifle on the side while they are pushing vegetables around on the plate, and don’t dish it up straight away. Teenage grandchildren seem to need vast amounts of food to be able to function, or even to get up in the morning, and are usually game for an old fashioned fruity, creamy something in a glass dish. This is not normal breakfast food, but what do I care?

. When their parents were tiny, I was producing meals on a very tight budget. I learned how to use apples and onions in the most amazing variety of ways. Onion soup for starters, belly pork with onions and apple sauce, and grandchildren’s trifle for a dessert, was in my view, a balanced meal. If they thought it looked like yesterdays dessert, I put hundreds and thousands on it. But not on the belly pork, obviously.

So, a large glass dish (or several small ones if you are serious about cutting down on the washing up, or one large dish and the requisite number of spoons if you want to be really environmentally friendly), a layer of Swiss roll, tip in the stewed apples, which should be stiff and fairly thick, then slosh on the custard. That is it. Eat it straight away.

I’ve lost memory of origin of the name here. It’s probably gaggles of harassed child minding grandmothers, throwing something together in a marathon of meal making. When it’s easy, cheapish and wolfed down, you produce it again. And pass on the recipe. Mind you, jam Swiss rolls are not always easy to find, and my mothers generation would have balked at a carton of custard.