Andrew's Wiki
Par Fait
Ten O’Clock Trifle
One night, we unexpectedly found ourselves to be without cake. I feel like I should have some kind of foreign language term for it, sans genoise or something, to explain the utter ennui and desperation it prompted in myself, if not in Andrew as well.
But never fear! The freezer will save us all, I decided, taking out the frozen Devil’s Food layer I’d squirreled away two weeks earlier. Trimming cakes (slicing the domes off a cooled but not frosted cake to make the layer perfectly even) always yields a little extra cake to munch on while you frost a cake, but if the cake was particularly disobedient in the oven and domed fantastically, you get a pretty big piece of cake that you can’t possibly incorporate in the finished cake or eat comfortably yourself while bending over the counter.
Usually, we just snack on it (“let’s test the cake and make sure it’s still good;” “let’s try it with the frosting to make sure they combine well”), but we had two generous domes in the case of Devils Hazelnut, so one I slapped in the freezer. When we were left tragically sans genoise the other night, I let it defrost while we ate a late dinner. I took out Andrew’s cute milk glasses (with little cows in the middle) and tamped down a layer of cake at the bottom to start a trifle.
I had been pondering my flavors as we watched Poirot after dinner, and at about 10:00 PM, I had my plan ready: I melted some butter into brown sugar (about 1.5 tablespoons butter to 3 tablespoons brown sugar) in the microwave, tossed 3/4 c peanuts in the mixture (we didn’t have any walnuts around, unfortunately), poured the mixture on some parchment paper, and tossed it in the oven on a cookie sheet on 375F. While that roasted, I whipped up 1/2 c cream with 2 tbs sugar, and, as it came to its fullest stiff-peak moment, added 2 tablespoons of coffee “extract” (1 tbs instant coffee crystals stirred into 1 tbs water) to make coffee whipped cream.
By the time the cream was ready, the brown sugared nuts were bubbling nicely. I spooned in some coffee cream in the cups, added some peanuts, and then made a second layer of cake, cream, and nuts.
Thank God for excessively domed cakes.
