Key Lime Trifle

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

You can’t have a party and not make dessert!

But I didn’t want a typical birthday cake, because I like to change things up.

Plus then, it limits my chance of having to stand there for the “Happy Birthday” song and nothing is more anxiety inducing to me than that. Well, that and opening up Christmas presents. I have some issues.

Anyway, 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.

Her recipe uses cookies that are like graham crackers, which I don’t love. But overall, I thought the recipe sounded good, so I decided to use it for inspiration 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 classic yellow cake for that. I did myself a favor and used box mix. I love making cake from scratch but with so many other things to make for the party, I used the cake mix for a bit of a shortcut. It came out well, so I’m sticking with that, although I’m sure that if you love your homemade yellow cake recipe it would turn out perfect with that as well.

Since the cake is rather moist to begin with, compared to graham crackers, I reduced the amount of evaporated milk in the recipe so the cake would not get too soggy.

The lime zest in the milk mixture, speckles the cake layers of the trifle. It makes it pretty, and let’s you know what kind of triple it is. A delicious trifle, yep!

The lime flavor is not over powering because it mainly is just the zest so it is pretty subtle. Plus, there already is plenty of sweetness from the condensed milk, so the bit of sour, acid from the limes really added a fun flavor to the trifle.

Now, I didn’t make this boozy, but I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Mix some tequila in the milk mixtures for a fun adult dessert. Boy oh boy, now you’re having a fiesta!

Now, it’s time for me to sneak off to the fridge again, to get another bowl. Yum!

Key Lime Trifle

Serves 16-20 people

Ingredients

1- 15 ounce Yellow Cake mix
4 limes
2- 14 ounce cans condensed milk
18 ounces evaporated milk (1 1/2 cans)
1 pint heavy cream
1/4 Cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 lime, for garnish

Process

Prepare the yellow cake according to instructions several hours in advance of preparing the trifle. Let the cake 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.
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.
Make the whipped cream by combining the heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla extract and mixing until you have soft peaks.
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.
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
To finish the trifle add the 3rd 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.
Garnish with lime wedges.

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