Gingerbread, Cranberry & Lemon Curd Trifle

I love assembling a trifle for dessert! The look impressive but are easy to assemble and vary, altering your ingredients with cake, fruit, custard or pudding, and whipped cream.

Gingerbread, Cranberry, and Lemon Curd Trifle is delicious and easy to assemble for Christmas with a few short cuts, preparing your components or layers in advance.

I had seen a recipe in the December issue of Cooking with Paula Deen for a Lemon-Gingerbread Trifle with Cranberries. The combination of flavors sounded wonderful and perfect for the holidays. I look for short cuts wherever I can find them this time of year and I used a box mix for the Gingerbread from Betty Crocker.

You can bake your gingerbread the day before assembling your trifle. It cooks in about 30 minutes and you can mix your cake in the pan you bake for easier clean up. I made two pans with two boxes of cake mix for this trifle and had just a little left over and some squares to enjoy with coffee or tea.

I found these holiday gingersnaps from Nyakers at World Market a couple of weeks ago. I got a kick out of the addition of the pig in box. I was familiar with the Peppermint Pig, as a symbol of good health, happiness and prosperity.

Nyakers are Swedish but I couldn’t find any Scandinavian Christmas traditions or significance of the pig in my google searches. If you know, please chime in :)

Paula’s trifle recipe used raw cranberries, while pretty, they are not something I want to bite into. For a sweet and tart layer, I mixed a jar of cranberry preserves with a 12 ounce bag of fresh cranberries, 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of sugar. Bring mixture to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer, stirring often, 10 to 15 minutes or until cranberries begin to pop and mixture starts to thicken. Remove from heat and cool completely and refrigerate until ready to assemble.

My go-to layer in trifle or in a layered cake is lemon curd mixed with cream cheese, in a ratio of one to one (jar to 8 ounce block). You could mix lemon curd with whipped cream if you prefer or use by itself to layer with the gingerbread. Top your trifle with whipped cream and add some gingersnap cookies.

Adjust your layers however you like, with the addition of more whipped cream, cranberry and/or pudding. The lemon flavor is wonderful with gingerbread along with a little tart cranberry flavor!

Wishing you a Delicious & Merry Christmas

and good health, happiness and prosperity

in the coming year!

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