Tiramisu Trifle

I had a Christmas party yesterday and made a lot of festive food for the table which I will be blogging about throughout the week. Every party needs a dessert centrepiece and this year I decided to make a trifle. It was mainly inspired by the Waitrose Christmas Dessert Campaign. Their research shows that the top 5 desserts that people enjoy as a tradition in households at Christmas are the following:

• Christmas Pudding
• Christmas Cake
• Mince Pie
• Chocolate Yule Log
• Trifle

Which one is your favourite and what are you making this year? Personally I'm not a fan of the first 3 so my plan was to make either a chocolate yule log or a trifle. I'm planning to make a yule log for Christmas day so I started thinking about how to put a twist on the traditional trifle. Italian cuisine is ony of my favourite cuisines and if I eat at an Italian restaurant I will almost certainly order tiramisu for dessert. Hence my tiramisu trifle. Waitrose kindly sent me a gift box which included a gift voucher to purchase the ingredients for this recipe. 

This trifle is made with pears poached in marsala wine and mulled wine spices, chocolate panettone soaked in marsala wine, traditional custard and Baileys infused cream. This is topped with Christmas sprinkles from Waitrose. I debated about making a coffee jelly but sadly ran out of time. The trifle was absolutely delicious and really was the star of the day. It's quite boozy but not overly so and anyway it just isn't Christmas with a tipple of alcohol in your dessert! 

I'm sending this to Baking With Spirit hosted by Janine from Cake of the Week. The theme this month is Christmas and this trifle definitely says Christmas!

 Baileys, Marsala wine, Chocolate panettone, double cream, custard, pears, mulled wine spices 

 I've never tried a chocolate panettone - I have some leftover to make panettone bread and butter pudding - look out for the recipe 

 waitrose sells mulled wine wpice packs which contains everything you need to make your own mulled wine

 pour about 3/4 bottle of marsala wine and 100g caster sugar into a pan. Add the mulled wine spices.

 Peel the pears and cut the bottom of so that it can stand upright.  Place the pears in the mixture on a low to medium heat. Cover and allow to cook, turning the pears ocassionally.  Finally stand them up so that the whole pear is infused with the wine and spices. 

 Slice each pear in half and layer the pears on the outside of the dish

 they look really pretty from the outside

 add chocolate panetoone and fill the gaps with more panettone

 pour the rest of the marsala wine on top of the panettone and leave to soak 

 add a layer of vanilla custard - I love how it fills the gaps between the pears 

finish with a layer of Baileys infused cream just because it's not Christmas without Baileys! 

 with Christmas sprinkles. Looks good on the festive food table

 Here's what the rest of the table looks like. The Christmas banner is from Waitrose

Disclaimer: I was sent a gift voucher from Waitrose to buy ingredients for this recipe along with the Christmas decoration and Christmas sprinkles. All opinions expressed are my own.