Your guests will think you’ve gone to pastry school with this dessert! Joke’s on them, though, because everything in this recipe is store bought!! I know, it sounds too good to be true but if you pair the right products and elevate some grocery store buys, you’ve got yourself a pretty stinkin’ good dessert. Plus, it is SO PRETTY. Whether you use stemmed white wine glasses like mine, or regular ol’ stemless glasses, they turn out quite pretty. Have fun with this recipe, I hope you enjoy it!
Note, if you work with a light hand, you might have enough ingredients to make an extra trifle or two! This recipe makes 4 trifles with ease.
This recipe takes 45 minutes to complete and makes 4 servings. Although, two people could easily share one glass. They are big!
Ingredients:
2 – 3 ounce packages instant lemon pudding mix
2 cups whole milk
½ cup lemon juice
16-ounce pound cake or vanilla loaf cake
Small bottle of Limoncello or lemonade (you’ll only need ½ cup at most)
14-ounce jar strawberry jam
16-ounce tub Cool Whip
16-ounce package fresh strawberries
4 wine glasses (any wine glass should work besides the huge red wine variety)
Directions:
1. To make the lemon pudding, combine the milk and lemon pudding mix together in a bowl and whisk for one minute, the liquid will thicken. Add the lemon juice and continue whisking for another minute. Allow to set for 5 minutes while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
2. Slice the crust off the pound cake then cut it into quarter inch slices. Next, cut each slice into small squares, about ½ inch in size but these don’t have to be perfect.
3. Place the prepared pound cake onto a lipped pan of any sort. Brush all of them with the Limoncello or lemonade. The goal here is to soak them but not make them soggy. Go ahead and pop one in your mouth to test it! Set the pound cake aside.
4. Spoon the lemon pudding, Cool Whip and strawberry jam** each into separate baggies. Close each baggie so the contents don’t fall out. Set aside.
5. Chop the strawberries into small pieces (I chopped each strawberry into 8 pieces), until you have 1 ½ cup chopped strawberries. Remember to pick out four of the prettiest strawberries and reserve those for garnish.
6. Now create your assembly line! You’ll need the four wine glasses, soaked pound cake, chopped strawberries and the baggies of pudding, Cool Whip and jam. Snip a quarter inch off the bottom corner of each baggie.
7. Now let’s layer the trifle! Line the bottom of each glass with a layer of pound cake, about 8 pieces.
8. Pipe about two tablespoons of lemon pudding on top of the pound cake in each glass. If eyeballing it makes you nervous, go ahead and measure out two tablespoons to see what it looks like but again, precision is not key to this recipe!
9. Use a spoon to push the pudding all the way to the edge of the glass then smooth it out in the center. The goal is to create an even layer from the edge to the center of the glass. Wipe off any extra pudding that’s stuck to the glass above the layer you’ve created.
10. Do the same with the jam**. Next, create a single layer of chopped strawberries. Finally, pipe about two tablespoons worth of Cool Whip and spread into an even layer.
11. Continue this sequence until you are nearing the top of the glass! Pound cake, lemon pudding, jam, chopped strawberries then Cool Whip. Leave space at the top of the glass for one additional layer you’ll add later. Place the trifles in the fridge.
12. The trifles will settle as they sit in the refrigerator. Allow them to settle for as long as you can before piping the last layer. From there, they’ll last a couple of hours fully assembled. When it comes time, pipe Cool Whip as the top layer (even if it’s out of sequence) and smooth it to be flush with the top of the glass (the smooth side of a butter knife works great for this). Wipe off any Cool Whip that’s fallen over the side of the glass. Add a whole strawberry on top as a garnish.
13. Refrigerate until ready to serve. These are best same day but will last an additional day in the fridge.
**Make sure to mush up the jam really well when you are spooning it into the baggie. The jam will be easier to smooth into layers that way. When it comes time to layer the trifle, it’ll create the thinnest layer of all the ingredients so don’t worry if the center is a little mixed with the lemon pudding. Just make sure to push the jam out to the edge of the glass so you can see it.