superbowl seahawks trifle

Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that football isn't really my bag. Soccer, sure. Rugby, kind of. Football? Not so much. I'm the type of person who watches the Superbowl just for the commercials, and then switches to the Puppy Bowl during all the actual game-playing. It's probably because it's one of the few sports I never played as a kid so the rules are kind of gibberish to me. This has led to an apathetic attitude when it comes to the whole thing.

But this year was different! I couldn't really avoid football this season because the Seahawks kicked some serious ass. (And also every single person in the PNW is obsessed with them.) So when the husband and I were invited to a Superbowl party, we decided to actually participate in the festivities for once. And when my MIL asked me to bring a dessert, I figured this was the perfect excuse to get creative and actually come up with something original instead of just finding a recipe on Pinterest like my lazy ass usually does.

I knew I wanted to make a trifle, because 1.) trifle is amazing & 2.) it's easy to customize. I decided to use angel food cake as the base and to also dye it blue, because why the hell not? I also knew I wanted to include pudding, because then I could dye that green and make everything oh-so-themey. Unfortunately the dead of winter is not the greatest time to find blue/green fruit (especially at my local dump of a Cost Cutter) so I ended up getting blueberry pie filling as the flavor component. Not sure if I would do so again, but it worked out okay. I needed some sort of texture included, so I crushed some graham crackers for that purpose. I only sprinkled a little bit, but in retrospect I should've used more because you could barely even tell there were graham cracker crumbs in it.

The photos are not exactly wonderful, but here's how I did it:

I thought about making angel food cake from scratch...but quickly decided against it. So I just used a mix.

 Because you have to be careful about over-mixing angel food, I beat it until it was moistened and then added the food coloring as quickly as I could. I actually wanted a darker color, but I didn't want to mess with the consistency so I stopped adding food coloring while I was ahead.

 As you can see, definitely NOT a tube pan like what you're supposed to use. I realized a little belatedly that I didn't have one, so I just made do with a 9" springform. Should've used my 10", but oh well.

 Mmm...so...delicious?
 

The whole springform thing didn't work out so well because I didn't use parchment paper to line it. I should've. I had to cut the cake out of the pan and made a bit of a mess.
 

The ingredients. (Just ignore the gin and wine in the background.)

The puddings! Cost Cutter only had the sugar free/fat free version of cheesecake pudding, which changes the texture and flavor of it. So I got vanilla as well so I could mix the two in hopes of salvaging it.

When making the cheesecake pudding (left), I cut the milk in half to make it a thicker consistency. I made vanilla (right) as instructed on the box.

To make them green, I dyed the milk before mixing it into the mix.

You can see what I mean about the gross consistency with the cheesecake flavor, while the vanilla is nice and velvety (as pudding should be!). But everything was okay once I mixed the two together.

I spent a lot of time punching this bag before realizing that using the can of pie filling as a mallet worked a whole lot better.

My number one reason for loving my KitchenAid is how easy it is to whip cream. I can't believe I used to use a hand mixer...(and before that, just elbow grease and a whisk...how did I do it?!)
I added only just a little powdered sugar at the end...the pie filling was so sweet that I wanted to try to balance the sweetness of everything.

It still doesn't really feel like I'm making something edible at this point...

Well this is slightly better.

Still not sure about the edibility, but at least it looks pretty!

All in all, I was pleased with the results. I would definitely want to use real blueberries next time though. And use a proper cake pan. And use normal cheesecake pudding. And more graham cracker crumbs.

But hey, it looked Seahawks-y enough so mission accomplished. And of course as the world is undoubtedly aware by now, they won! There was much rejoicing. So who knows, maybe next year I'll start paying attention to games and actually learn enough to give a shit.

Any excuse to make a dessert, really.