Recommendations

Orange trifle with Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry

In the glass bowl are layers of cake soaked in sherry and orange juice, with orange segments, crumbled almond biscuits and a blanket of homemade egg custard. The cream sherry sets against it a wine that already takes part in the recipe itself.

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From the shelf

The bottle

Harveys Bristol Cream has existed since 1882, is made in Jerez de la Frontera and, since the redistribution of the old sherry houses, is a brand of González Byass. According to the Consejo Regulador, a cream is a blend: oxidatively aged wine, mainly oloroso, is mixed with naturally sweet wine or concentrated must, after which the wine ends up between 115 and 140 grams of residual sugar per litre. Harveys blends four sherries here, namely fino, amontillado, oloroso and Pedro Ximenez, each ageing separately in the solera system for between three and twenty years; the final wine has an average age of about seven years. The bottle is at 17.5 percent alcohol and comes in 75 centilitres.

Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry

The combination

Why this works together

A trifle is historically a sherry dish: the cake is soaked in sweet sherry, and that is what this bottle has been used for for centuries, so if you pour the same wine into the glass, no bridge needs to be built, because it is already in the bowl. On top of that, the sweetness level is right, because a trifle is not exuberantly sweet: the orange juice brings acidity and the custard is only lightly sweetened. A cream with 115 to 140 grams of residual sugar per litre sits just above that, and that is the right proportion; a wine that is drier than the dessert comes across as sour. Finally, there is an aromatic overlap between the oloroso part of the blend, with its nutty oxidative tone, and the almond biscuits in the layers. The Consejo explicitly mentions fruit and pastry for cream.

At the table

The dish

For 4 people
Ready in 40 minutes, plus 1 to 2 hours cooling
Type dessert

What you need

185 g sponge cake or Swiss roll
40 ml Harveys Bristol Cream, for soaking
40 ml freshly squeezed orange juice
3 oranges, peeled and cut into segments without pith
85 g almond biscuits, coarsely crumbled
330 ml whole milk
80 ml cream
3 egg yolks
35 g fine caster sugar
1.5 tablespoons cornflour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

How to make it

First make the custard. Heat the milk in a pan until just below boiling point.
Whisk the whipping cream, vanilla extract, cornflour, egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl. Pour in the hot milk and stir well.
Put the mixture back into the pan and warm it gently while you keep stirring, until it thickens. Do not let it boil. Then let the custard cool.
Cut the cake into slices of about one and a half centimetres and lay them on the bottom and along the sides of a glass dish.
Mix the sherry with the orange juice and spoon it over the cake so that it soaks it up.
Spread the orange segments and the crumbled almond biscuits over the cake; keep some of the segments back.
Spoon the cooled custard over it and smooth it out.
Cover the dish and put it in the fridge for one to two hours. Finish with the reserved orange segments before serving.

In the glass

Serving

Serve this cream chilled at 10 to 12 degrees, the temperature the Consejo Regulador uses for this style, in a white wine glass or catavinos. Keep the portion modest, about a third of a glass, especially if you have also soaked the dish with the same wine. An opened cream keeps for a long time: the Consejo reckons on about two months for blended and oxidatively aged sherry with the bottle closed and stored cool.

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