WhimsyLand

Well, actually I have a dozen people to trifle with as I'm wandering over to Cath's to have dinner with her Terry and various sons and friends of the younger persuasion.  My responsibility is dessert, and it occurred to me that I haven't made a good trifle in years.  I think the last time was when Sweet Junie and I lugged one down to Ally and John's, and I think bell-bottoms were still in style.   But first, some news about my tiling.  Dima showed up on Saturday and was a backboarding maniac, measuring every cut 7 times, laying down the thinset in perfect rows of quarter-inch whiteness.  Truth be told, Dima was originally a mechanical engineer, so he adopts this superior affect quite naturally around me.  Me, who was variously a physics, economics, computer science and business major.  On the other hand, I did work a few summers in construction, usually the really dirty jobs like grinding a window out of solid concrete with a rotary saw, a carborundum disk, and nothing remotely resembling safety goggles.  But, I digress.  Dima was pretty much the field boss on this gig.  My responsibility was to keep us in good coffee, and screw in a couple of dozen self-tapping screws when the Hardieboard was nicely seated in the thinset.  You have to remember that I was drilling through what was basically concrete, so I was sore-wristed by the end of the day.  On the other hand, I did get to buy some cool new tools, which makes any self-respecting guy feel better.  I spent the next day filling up the spaces between the boards with thinset and laying down fiberglass tape and trying my best to figure out what "feathering the joint" meant.  I never did figure that out, but I did note that the whole point is to have a really, really flat underfloor, so the next morning I fired up my little rotary sander and wiggled my way across the small mounds that represented my taping job.  The kitchen floor is now ready for tile.  Well, actually it's ready for using my new chalk line and other paraphernalia to figure out the dead center of the kitchen so I can lay tile in the recommended way with all the tile fractions of equal sizes on the baseboards, which still seems really inefficient, but supposedly if you don't do that your inner ear gets thrown out of whack as soon as you enter the room.

And speaking of trifle.  I used to make trifle a lot.  Of course, I used to make a lot of things a lot, and then the fad passsed and then I didn't.  The difference is that trifle has its own bowl and I have one and it reminds me from time to time to do one again.  The problem with that is that it would take me a week to eat it and it would one of those "a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips" kind of things.  There are, as you can imagine, a zillion recipes for trifle, but that's mainly because these days anything goes and if you are gluten-intolerant it's perfectly OK to leave the sponge cake out of the trifle.  The original recipe was mainly custard, raspberries, liqueur, trifle cake, whipped cream and some confiture.  I've adapted the recipe somewhat.  My shopping list today had on it:  pound cake, apricot jam, fresh raspberries, fresh blueberries, fresh blackberries, heavy cream for whipping, a dozen eggs to make the heavy custard, a lemon for a little zest, no sherry because I already have it, and I know I'm forgetting something. What you really want is God's Own Twinkies without the filling for the sponge cake and I noticed that an English site actually sold "trifle spongecakes", but I'm hardly going to get those in time, so I opted for pound cake, which I will slice into columns and line the outside of the trifle with them so they serve as visual pillars of sensual support when viewed from the outside of the trifle bowl.  Then, you pour in some red berries, and then some vanilla wafers for body, and them some apricot jam perhaps, and then some blueberries or blackberries, haven't decided which yet, and then a layer of heavy custard, and then more wafers and perhaps some more custard and then berries and then a lovely layer of hand-whipped cream and keep doing this as the strata build and the riot of color takes shape as viewed from the outside of said trifle bowl.  I'm thinking I'll put some blueberries and toasted almost slices on top, and WAIT, I just forgot that you just can't forget to add mandarin oranges somewhere along the way.  
As you can tell, I like making trifle.  I'm a little bit sure that one reason my poem "Anabasis" got accepted by Iowa Review and Poetry Daily was because there was a trifle bowl in it.  I'll tell you how it turns out, but in reality, I've never had a bad trifle.