Sweets for your Sweet Mom on Mother's Day
Make Delicious Desserts to Serve at a Tea or at Dinner
Every Englishtea consists of either scones and toppings or dainty sandwiches, but every English tea needs to have a cake, a pie perhaps, or cookies.
One very nice thing is a Trifle. A trifle is a mixture of cake, pudding, fruit, and occasionally a little bit of brandy. You can omit the brandy if you have young children because it will not be cooked and the alcohol will not burn off.
English Trifle
Ingredients:
- 1 full angle food cake
- 1 cup raspberry jam, divided (you can use any jam – strawberry, peach, etc)
- 1 – 29 ounce can sliced peaches, drained but reserve the juice
- ½ cup brandy, divided (optional)
- 1 small box vanilla pudding mix (use the kind you have to cook – not instant)
- 3 cups milk
- 2 cups non dairy whipped topping
- Sliced toasted almonds
Directions:
- Tear up half of the angle food cake into bite size pieces and place in the bottom of a large glass bowl.
- Cover with half of the jam and half of the drained peaches.
- Pour enough of the peach juice over top to moisten the cake but not make everything sloppy.
- Pour half of the brandy over top.
- Start layering again with the cake pieces, jam, peaches, peach juice, and brandy.
- Make pudding with the 3 cups of milk.
- Pour the hot pudding over top of the trifle and let cool to room temperature.
- Spread whipped topping on top and sprinkle on the almonds.
- Cover with plastic wrap.
- Make this treat the night before because it has to be refrigerated about 24 hours before serving.
Lemon Tarts in Puff Pastry
Don’t get frightened. Using frozen puff pastry isn’t all that hard and you can produce a fancy tart.
Ingredients:
- 6 Frozen Puff Pastry Shells
- 1 small package lemon pudding and pie filling (do not get instant – you need the type that is cooked)
- 1 tablespoon grated lemon rind
- 1 cup non dairy whipped topping
Instructions:
- Make the puff pastry shells according to package directions. After removing from oven let them cool completely.
- Prepare pudding as to package directions for a pie filling (usually uses less milk).
- Stir in lemon rind and let cool to room temperature.
- Pull tops off and remove any of the soft insides from the shells.
- Spoon 1/3 cup pudding into the shells.
- Top with non dairy whipped topping.
You can replace the tops after filling with pudding (the pastry will not totally close) and drizzle with chocolate syrup instead of using whipped topping. It is best to make these and serve them within a few hours (2) but if you are not serving at once cover the top with wax paper and refrigerate. The bottoms tend to get soggy the longer they sit in the refrigerator. This makes 6 tarts so if you are having more people just double the recipe.
Linzer Cookies
Linzer cookies are made with ground almonds and raspberry jam and are simply luscious. For this recipe you need two different sized heart cookie cutters. You can use any shape cookie cutters, but for mother’s day – a heart is what is needed.
Ingredients:
- 1 – ½ sticks unsalted butter, room temperature (don’t use margarine)
- ½ cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon lemon rind
- ¼ teaspoon almond flavoring
- 1-1/2 cups blanched almonds, finely chopped
- 2-1/4 cup cake flour (this dough is very dense and requires cake flour usually found in boxes in the baking section of the grocery store)
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 6 ounces raspberry jam
- Powdered sugar
Directions:
- In a mixing bowl with an electric mixer, cream butter.
- Add sugar and cream well.
- Add egg, lemon rind, and almond flavoring and mix well.
- Add ground almonds.
- In another bowl combine cake flour, baking powder, and salt.
- Gradually add to creamed mixture mixing well after each addition.
- Form dough into a ball and chill for at least 2 hours or overnight.
- Roll dough between two pieces of parchment paper (you don’t want to do this on a floured surface because you don’t want to add more flour to the dough). Roll to 1/8 inch thickness.
- Put dough still between parchment paper in the freezer for 5 to 10 minutes.
- Preheat oven to 350.
- Cut out an even number of large hearts.
- Then for half of them cut out the middle with the smaller cookie cutter.
- Bake on cookie sheets covered with parchment paper for 10 to 12 minutes or until edges are brown.
- Cool on a wire rack. Be careful, the hearts with the cutouts in the center will be delicate. Make sure to bake the small hearts you removed from the center along with the others. If one of the larger ones with the cutouts breaks you can still use the smaller hearts instead.
- In a sauce pan heat the raspberry jam just until hot – do not boil.
- Spread the whole heart cookie with jam all the way to the edges.
- Top with one of the hearts that has a cut out in the center and press down to set.
- Fill the heart impression with a little more jam and sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar.
- If one of the cut out large hearts should break use one of the small hearts and place in the center of the cookie after it has jam spread on it.
- Let these sit and cool about 1 hour before serving.
- This will make about 12 to 20 cookies depending on the size of the cookie cutter.
Serve these luscious sweets with your Mother’s Day tea and make Mom very happy.
linzer cookies
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