glutenfreedirtcheap

One of my odd hobbies is checking out the gluten-free sections of the various grocery stores in my area. If you’re in Austin, one of biggest I have seen is at 183 and Braker. They have gluten-free ladyfingers, made by a popular European gluten-free manufacturer called Schar. (That’s with an umlaut, if anyone wants to tell me the HTML for “umlaut”.) I have no idea what you make with ladyfingers other than trifle, but, here is a very cheap version of classic British trifle.

Ingredients:

Cool Whip in the pressurized can. (It keeps forever in the refrigerator, while simultaneously being fun because of the nitrous oxide.)

8 or 9 strawberries

2 teaspoons Hershey’s cocoa

2 teaspoons sugar

Schar gluten-free ladyfingers

Kitchen Apparati:

2 cup glass bowl so that you can see the pretty layers

small bowl for mixing cocoa and Cool Whip into mousse

measuring teaspoon

mixing teaspoon

Directions:

In your best mafioso voice say, “This is gonna hurt me a lot more than it hurts you.” Break several of the ladyfingers in half and arrange them in a spiral in the bottom of the bowl. Mix 1 teaspoon cocoa with about 1 1/2 cups Cool Whip and 1 teaspoon sugar. Layer the resulting chocolate mousse on top of the ladyfingers. Wash and thinly slice 2 or 3 strawberries and layer them on top of the chocolate mousse. Add another layer of spirally arranged broken ladyfingers, spray plain Cool Whip onto the ladyfingers and smooth the layer over to form a level base for the next layer of strawberries. Wash, slice and arrange the strawberries along the edges of the bowl. In your mixing bowl, stir together about half a cup of Cool Whip with 1 teaspoon cocoa and 1 teaspoon sugar. (This will be a much smaller, darker amount of chocolate mousse.) Carefully put the mousse in the center of the top strawberry ring. Take a final firm strawberry and cut off the leaves. Holding the strawberry with the leaf side down, cut small vertical cuts in the outsides of the strawberry, to form petals, being careful not to cut so far that the petals are separated from the rest of the strawberry. Repeat one layer of strawberry petals in, and then cut a small slice into the center of the strawberry. Pull the petals out a little bit and then put the remaining strawberry rose into the center of the trifle. (Cheap doesn’t have to mean ugly.) Refrigerate the whole thing for at least two hours to let the ladyfingers absorb some of the mousse.

Cost: About $4.00 for the entire dessert.