Christmas Recipe: Luxury Gingerbread Trifle

I received a box of Christmas foods from Creamline Dairies and I was asked to cook nice things with it, this gingerbread trifle one of the nice things.

Growing up, Christmas wasn’t Christmas without a sherry trifle made with so much sherry you’d fail to pass a breathalyser test on the way home. Trifle was always sponge fingers soaked in about half a pint of sherry, jelly with tinned fruit in, custard, cream and sprinkles. It’s a classic, and a classic for a very good reason.

These days, as much as a hanker for a traditional trifle, sometimes I like to mix things up a bit. The year of the black forest trifle was exceptional, but this year I’ve decided to serve up a gingerbread trifle. With all new things, it’s good to do a test run so you can tweak it to perfection on the big day. I have to say, there’s very little I’d change about this.

This week I received a Christmas food box from Creamline Diaries. I chose a selection of foods from their Christmas range and it was delivered direct to my door, with no queuing or faff of any kind. The box is packed with brilliant locally produced food from independent producers. The meat is from my local butchers, the bread is from a fantastic local baker and fresh fish from the fishmongers. The fruit and veg are fresh from the market each day and you can even stock up your store cupboard.

My Creamline box was brilliant and contained pretty much everything I needed to make this delicious gingerbread trifle. It’s just the thing if you want to shop local, but don’t really have the time to visit all your local shops, or if you just can’t carry all your shopping home. It’s also a boon at Christmas, saving you slogging around a supermarket, or queuing up for ages in the cold outside the local independent shops you love best, who are all part of this scheme anyway!

creamline dairies

Gingerbread Trifle

Ingredients:
4 Christmas Morning Muffins, or Jamaican ginger cake
Gingerbread syrup, approx 50mls
2 pints of custard, cooled
500mls Jersey double cream
Half a packet of ginger nuts, crushed
Some gingerbread men to decorate
Optional – a drop of rum, spiced is nice!

How to make your gingerbread trifle:

This is quite quick to make once you have everything assembled in front of you. So before you begin, make you custard an chill it thoroughly, whip your cream and crush your ginger nuts. Find a nice trifle dish or glass bowl and roll your sleeves up.

Take your Christmas Morning Muffins out of their wrappers and cut into three equally thick slices. You’ll need two muffins for each layer. If you can’t get hold of Christmas Morning Muffins, then a good substitute is slices of Jamaican ginger cake. Arrange them in the bottom of the dish and drizzle approximately 25mls of the gingerbread syrup. If you’re also using rum, now is the time to drizzle over some of that too!

Christmas Recipe: Luxury Gingerbread Trifle

Spoon over half of your cooled custard and smooth the surface. Give the bowl a gentle shake so it can fall into the gaps between the cake layer. Next, carefully spoon over half of the whipped cream and smooth that layer out too.

Next take about 4 biscuits worth of crushed ginger nuts and sprinkle them evenly over the top of the cream. It’s now time to repeat the process.

Lay another layer of Christmas muffins or ginger cake and drizzle over the with remaining gingerbread syrup and a bit of rum if you’re using that. Then spoon over the remaining custard, then the cream and make sure your top cream layer is nice and even. Sprinkle over some more crushed gingernut biscuits and then decorate with your little gingerbread men. I used three and propped them up together on the top. Feel free to let your imagination and creativity run wild at this point!

Christmas Recipe: Luxury Gingerbread Trifle

I left my gingerbread trifle to sit in the fridge for a few hours before serving and by gosh, it was delicious. If you really love ginger, you might want to be a bit more generous with the syrup, but it’s a great trifle. It’s rich, its delicious and it’s a real crowd pleaser! Everything you need this Christmas!

Big thanks to Creamline Diaries who saved me having to carry a heap of shopping home, for supporting local businesses and for having an excellent selection of great quality, locally produced food.

Christmas Recipe: Luxury Gingerbread Trifle

Review: Creamline Best of Local Box delivered to your door

Over the years we’ve tried all kinds of veg box schemes. We’ve tried those recipe boxes and we’ve had a milkman, then no milkman because the local diary closed, now we have another milkman because another dairy opened. Getting food delivered to the door isn’t just convenient, with the Creamline Best of Local Box scheme, you can get brilliant locally produced food from independent producers delivered to your door.

Review: Creamline Best of Local Box delivered to your door

I live in South Manchester and I was asked to give the Best of local Box a try. Where I can I do try to shop local, and I buy directly from a number of the Best of Local suppliers on a regular basis. I knew that the contents of the box would be of a really high standard, but would it be more expensive?

The Creamline website it really simple to use. Just browse and add to your basket the products you want delivered, choose your delivery day, pay and then wait for the knock on the door.

Review: Creamline Best of Local Box delivered to your door

I had a good look and what was on offer, then meal planned around that. I was excited that there was a baker, something we don’t really have locally anymore; so I did go a bit wild when ordering bakery products.

Here’s my order for my first box…

Review: Creamline Best of Local Box delivered to your door

The meat products are what I usually buy from the butchers who supply Creamline anyway. The meat were the most expensive part of my order; we ate some straight away and I put the rest in the freezer for another day. I always think it’s better to buy good quality meat and eat a little less of it, than cheap, low quality meat.

The bread, rolls and bakes were incredibly quality. I’m so used to bland supermarket bread that just some toast made with the bloomer was a real treat. If you order the Best of Local Box, them it’s well worth stocking up on this gorgeous bread. I can also highly (HIGHLY) recommend the millionaires flapjack, which was superb.

The fruit and veg come daily from Manchester’s Smithfield Market. It was as fresh as could be. The watermelon lasted for ages and made one boy very happy (watermelon is his favourite thing).

I really loved my Creamline Best of Local Box. I knew everything was made within a few miles of my home, by local people who really care about the quality of what they produce. It’s exactly the kind of thing I would order and will order in the future.

Review: Creamline Best of Local Box delivered to your door

I think that sometimes when you order a food box, you’re not really sure where the food has come from and what kind of quality it will be. I already shop with a number of the shops who supply the Creamline Best of Local boxes; so it’s just a more convenient way for me to shop, without the bother of carrying it home. It’s delivered to my door, well packed, free of charge and by a cheery person.

The box is no more expensive that going from local shop to local shop. It’s great quality and I feel like I’m still doing my “shop local” bit to help my high street.

They’ve even got a discount code on their website right now if you want to try it out for yourself!

For more information about the Best of Local Box, visit the Creamline website.

We reviewed the Creamline fruit and veg box a few years ago, you can read about that here.

Disclosure: I was given a Creamline Best of Local box for review purposes. All images and opinions are my own.

Confessions from the Toy Shop

This December I have been busy working in my local independent toy shop. A friend owns it and she promised me coffee and some wages if I helped her out. I like both of those things, so I cheerfully snapped her hand off.

The toy shop in question is a lovely establishment, packed full of gorgeous toys and games. Not a behemoth the size of ten football pitches; like Sodom and Gomorrah but with Barbie dolls and LEGO. It’s thankfully very different to that, it is an incredibly pleasant place to shop and work (there’s coffee, remember) and I’ve enjoyed my time at the tills immensely.

Now follows some thoughts and observations from my time in a toy shop during the busiest toy selling month of the year…

A fairly obvious one to start; the most successful shoppers are the organised ones. Those who come with a list of things they’ve already checked out on the website, or phoned ahead and we’ve put it to one side for them. You’re awesome, we love you. We love the lady who had everything listed on a spreadsheet. We love the “combat shoppers” who come in, blitz the shop and get all their shopping over and done with in half an hour. You wonderfully organised people, we salute you!

If you’re buying for someone else’s child it helps to have a vague idea of what they’re into. If they’re four and into pirates we can sort you out. If they’re four and you have absolutely no clue, we give it our best guess, but half an idea is a starting point.

If you want a really big expensive item like a train table or a dolls house we might have to order that in especially for you. This can’t happen on Christmas Eve. I’m sorry.

We love the people who appreciate our collection of silly seasonal hats, antlers and elf ears. Sadly we don’t sell them, but feel free to make me an offer I can’t refuse.

We’re small and local and that makes us chatty and friendly and a bit above and beyond helpful. Yes I am sorry that I wrap presents so slowly, but just look at it, it’s a work of art!

Approximately 99.9% of the customers are very lovely. It’s a toy shop, we sell happy things in packages. There’s no grumpiness or snark, no shouting or fighting over the last Furby (we don’t sell them anyway), it’s just an incredibly nice place to work.

Working in a toy shop in December has been hard work, but so much fun. I’ve met some lovely people; cooed over tiny babies, given reindeer food to toddlers, chatted dinosaurs, scooters and slime with children. Hidden vast packages under the counter for parents on a Christmas mission. I’ve wrapped, packed and taped presents, curled ribbon, priced up a thousand items, made hundreds of cups of coffee and loved every minute of the most fun job I’ve ever had in my life.

If you ever needed a reason to shop locally or pop into your local independent toy shop, then if it’s that brilliant just working there, then it can’t be a bad place to shop either.

Shop Local #SmallBizSatUK

Today (Saturday 7th of December) is Small Business Saturday. We shouldn’t need it, and to my mind it’s a sad indictment of our nations shopping habits; but today is a day when we’re all encouraged to shop local and indeed celebrate our brilliant local shops. I’ve previously blogged about how much I love my local high street and feel I need to get behind this day of days too.

For some that’ll be hugely difficult; the enormous behemoth out of town shopping centres will have rendered their high streets barren and their shops boarded up and empty.

I know how hard it can be to make the effort to shop local, especially as Christmas approaches and it’s really tempting to just go to a huge megastore and heap everything into a trolley and have done with it. I used to do that, but the last few years, I’ve preferred to spend my money locally in the knowledge that I’m helping to provide local jobs and support businesses in my community.

Did you know that for every £100 spent in local independent shops around £48 is ploughed back into your community, whereas for huge supermarkets and the like, it’s only £13.

For the lucky folk of south Manchester, in particular the good people of Didsbury we are blessed with some amazing independent shops and businesses. I know a few local shops have embraced the day, here’s what I’ve garnered from Twitter, Google and local gossip.

Giddy Goat Toys – Mince pies, stollen cake, Kids Lucky Dip, your fave Christmas tunes playing & some very awesome toys
Airyfairy Cupcakes – A free cupcake with any purchase, open 10am-5pm
The Flower Lounge – A free gift for customers visiting the shop on Saturday
Harriet & Dee – A free gift with every purchase as a thank you to thier lovely customers

I urge you to shop local, especially this Christmas. It’ll give you a nice warm, fuzzy feeling, I promise.

Why I Support My Local High Street

I’ve just been for a walk around my village, a place I’ve lived all my life. I popped into a few shops, I’ve stocked up my cupboards and started my Christmas shopping (eek). I love Didsbury with it’s strong community spirit and it’s great independent shops and businesses.

Didsbury is a suburb of Manchester divided into three parts, East, West and the Village. There aren’t many shops in East Didsbury, a small smattering maybe, but Didsbury village and Burton Road in West Didsbury are buzzing with independent shops and businesses. I think this makes the area so unique and vibrant.

I live in Didsbury village and my favourite shops, in no particular order are:

Giddy Goat Toys
Airyfairy Cupcakes
The Cheese Hamlet
Evans the fishmongers
Axons the butchers
Harriet & Dee

These are all fantastic local businesses which I make a very special effort to support. I’m married to a local businessman and I know how badly the economic downturn has affected local businesses. We try where possible to shop local and now I’m at home all day I can happily while away a few hours doing my shopping and having coffee somewhere lovely. I know that is a luxury that not everyone can enjoy.

Wherever you live can I urge you to support your local shops and businesses. Yes the big chains have their place, but if you shop locally then you’re essentially supporting your community. You’re making it an interesting, vibrant place, you’re helping to support businesses which employ local people, you’re reinvesting in your town. Most of all, you do get a nice warm fuzzy feeling from shopping locally and you’ll more than likely pick up some bargains too.

What’s your town like? Is it buzzing or does Mary Portas need to step in? Do you shop locally or are you supermarket mad? I’d love to know what you think.

Note: I’ve not been paid to write this post, I just really love my local shops!