Strawberry Trifle: The Extra Flavor is Meh.

On the second Sunday of this year I made King Arthur Flour's Original Butter Pound Cake. We put half in the freezer and I've been waiting ever since for some decent strawberries to come along.

Because, see, I have this issue. I'm afraid of stuff not getting cooked all the way - particularly baked goods. You can use the toothpick test on a lot of stuff, but if the cake is supermoist (isn't that a Duncan Crocker word?) it can be hard to tell because crumbs still stick and all that. So... yes, I cooked this until it was dry and sad and needed something.

That something was tasty strawberries all macerated and juicy so that the pound cake could soak up awesome tasty strawberry juice.

So it's still way too early for decent berries, even if they haul them up from California.

Except for Costco had some and they were pretty close to awesome. I was fooled. We ate the Costco berries over the course of a day, but I had it in my head that in a week or two I'd buy more and we'd haul out that cake and it'd be awesome!

So, with this cemented in my head I went and bought crap strawberries from Safeway because Costco had nothing but stinky moldberries.

I could have changed my mind. I could have figured out a different recipe but ooooooh no. I was going to have tasty berries and cake and it would be great.

Except after eating a couple of berries it really sank in that it so wasn't going to be okay. They weren't freakmolded like Costco's but they were lacking. So I went and found Emerille's recipe and thought that would work. It would also let me use my trifle dish!!!! I bought the dish a good 4-5 years ago and never used it for anything but storing a pile of tea-lights.

My first problem was that I followed the recipe. I didn't think the amounts of sugar in the berries and the pastry cream was enough. But I'd never made pastry cream before, so what did I know.

I let the berries macerate in the sugar and liqueur for a good two hours, so they'd be extra juicy.

I layered cubes of my pound cake in the bottom and did my best to get all the juice poured over the cake. Then I added berries, cream, berries and cream again. The recipe called for three layers of each but Emerille can eat it.

Oh, then you top it with sweetened whipped cream and some chocolate shavings.

This is what it looked like:

Well, that's what it looked like after dishing out a few servings. I guess it was sorta pretty - in an Old Country Buffet sort of way.
The cream was very light on the sugar but heavy and gross on the tongue, the whipping cream on top didn't do anything, it was just more cream.

I'm not sure what, if anything, would have fixed this. Maybe this is just how it was supposed to be and I'm too much of a corn syrup glutting oink to enjoy it.

Nah, it's just Emerille.

We ate maybe a quarter of this. I spent the next two days picking out berries and cake cubes before giving up on it and scraping it into the garbage. What a waste.