Magazine Monday #59: Pumpkin Gingerbread Trifle (Solstice Dessert!)

Finally, a week after the fact, I present to you the dessert I made for this year's Solstice meal, and let me tell you, this is a doozy! I knew the moment I saw it in the November (and final) issue of Gourmet Magazine, that I had to make this. It was just too good to pass up.

And boy was I right! This was an incredible concoction. And pretty simple to make. You can find the original recipe here.

The only change I made to the recipe was that, for the gingerbread cake, I used about 1/4 cup of chopped ginger in syrup that came in Jodi's parcel, and I reduced the ground ginger to about 1 tsp. It was a good call; the chopped ginger really added a lot of flavour to the cake. In the end, however, it wasn't the greatest gingerbread I've ever had, but since it was going in a trifle, it didn't matter as much.

The pumpkin mousse was fabulous and easy to make. In fact, in general, this was a very easy dessert to put together, and very light. I would definitely make this again!

As it happened, it didn't all get eaten on Solstice, so guess what I had for breakfast the following three mornings? Yep. And it makes an awesome breaky, too, I must say!

Real Gingerbread

I know it's summer, but... I just had this craving for something autumnal, something warm and spicy. Since Magazine Monday is on hold until Ivonne gets back from holiday next month, I'll post this magazine recipe today instead.

I was recently gifted with a bunch of baking supplies from my brother and SIL, who are moving across the country at the end of this month. I took what I would normally use, and they had a lot of molasses they wanted to unload. While molasses isn't necessarily that expensive, these things add up, and I do like gingery-molassesy things. This recipe, from the March 2007 issue of Gourmet, uses fresh ginger, not the powdered kind. And it's great. The texture of this cake is wonderfully moist, and that is in part attributable to the hot water you add to the batter, so don't get all lazy and add cold water instead.

You could totally dress this up with some creme anglaise or some other reasonable immitation of a vanilla custard, or serve it warm with vanilla frozen yogurt or ice cream.

I have gobbled down two chunks of this already today, before it was even cooled. Um...I'm going to gift the rest of it, I think, to a convalescing family member.

The recipe can be found here.