Price and I recently had a party at our place for my birthday. It was centered around a Mexican theme so I’ll be posting a few recipes from that that works well for a fiesta or just a great gathering. Enjoy!

When I was planning out the menu for our party I hopped over to Food Network to look up some recipes for inspiration. I absolutely love Chef Marcela Valladolid and her show Mexican Made Easy is one of my favorite FN shows. She has a recipe called Key Lime Trifle that I thought was interesting. I am not a huge fan of graham crackers and I would need to have needed much more than what the recipe calls for so I decided to as a spring board to make a trifle to serve to our guests.

As I have said in previous posts, trifles are one of my favorite desserts. I love the combination of cake, pudding, whipped cream and candy. I think that I love that the possibilities are endless when making a trifle. In this case, I didn’t want to use graham crackers so I substituted cake for that. In one of the way I adjusted the recipe, I used less evaporated milk because I didn’t want the cake to get too moist and loose it’s shape.

The lime zest that dots the entire trifle is so lovely. It provides a nice little pop of color in the dessert as well as informs you of the flavor you are about to enjoy. The lime is not over powering because it mainly is just the zest so it is pretty subtle. I think the consistency of the cake after is soaks in the milk mixture is lovely- not too cakey, not too soggy.

Key Lime Trifle

Serves 16-20 people

Ingredients

• Yellow Cake mix
• 2 cans condensed milk
• 1 1/2 cans evaporated milk
• 4 limes
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• pint heavy cream

Process

1. Prepare yellow cake according to instructions several hours in advance of preparing the trifle. Let cool until you can touch it, cut into 1″ x 1″ pieces. Lay the pieces out on cookies sheets and leave uncovered. If you don’t have the luxury of time, once the cake has been cut up put your oven warm and let the cake sit in there for at least 30 minutes until the cake has dried out a bit.
2. While the cake is cooling, prepare the milk mixture for the trifle. Zest all the limes and putting the grated zest in large bowl. Add the condensed milk, evaporated milk, and juice of 1 lime to the bowl and mix thoroughly.
3. Make the whipped cream by combining the heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla extract and mixing until you have soft peaks.
4. In your trifle bowl, layer 1/3 of the cake at the bottom of the bowl. Slowly pour 1/3 of the milk mixture over the cake covering all pieces. Layer 1/3 of the whipped cream on top of the cake pieces.
5. Create another layer of cake on top of the whipped cream mixture. Slowly pour 1/3 of the milk mixture on top of the cake. Gently press down the trifle at this point. Top with another layer of whipped cream
6. To finish the trifle add the 3nd layer of cake to the trifle. Evenly, pour the remaining milk mixture of the cake and then top with whipped cream to complete the top.
7. Garnish with strips of lime peel* or serve with fresh fruit.

*To get strips of zest I suggest this OXO Good Grips Lemon Zester.

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