An old friend visited for the first time since pre-pandemic, so I pushed the boat out a bit and made a nice lunch. Nothing fancy, just simple, nourishing peasant food: a thick leek and potato cawl to start followed by a multi-layered trifle for pudding.

Layer 1: Lemon sponge and tangerine segments, soaked in orange & lemon jelly
Layer 2: Vanilla custard
Layer 3: Raspberries in raspberry jelly
Layer 4: Whipped cream + mascarpone
Layer 5: Sliced bananas + grated dark chocolate

The lemon sponge was home-made; the custard was home-made, with seeds scraped from vanilla pods and egg yolks; the fruits used (lemon, tangerine, orange, raspberry, banana) were all fresh; the jelly was home-made, using vegetarian gelling powder (carrageenan seaweed + locust bean gum) and squeezed fruit juice; the dark chocolate was 90% cocoa solids; the creams were whipped manually with a whisk. Oh, and I took a photo:

It was all a bit ad-hoc and rushed and nothing special, I’ve done far better trifles countless times (I learnt by watching my mother as a kid). But my old Caerfyrddin comrade, who always had a sweet tooth, wolfed down a big bowl of it and came back for second helpings. I pretended I wasn’t interested in such retro, fattening, nursery food, waited until he had gone, then pigged out on what was left. After that, with blood sugar levels soaring, I had to have a little lie down…

The main purpose of this particular blog post, by the way, is to try to get to grips with the ‘colour’ feature in the new WordPress ‘block editor’ – hence the trifling content.

Picture: Dic Mortimer