Vegan Trifle

This was how I commemorated the Millenium - at midnight on 31 December 1999 a few of us were sat around a bonfire in a suburban Edinburgh garden getting tucked into some vegan trifle! The recipe makes 2 trifles or you can have one trifle and a fruit sponge pudding. Trifle purists will argue of course that you have to have whipped cream and hundreds and thousands on top, but spongey-jelly-fruit with vanilla dessert is good enough for me! The sponge recipe was adapted from Neal Barnard's lowfat recipe for Fruit Cobbler.

Ingredients (sponge)

• half cup sugar (feel free to experiment with less)
• 2 tablespoons cornflour
• half cup water
• 1 tin of fruit in juice
• one and a quarter cups white flour
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1.5 tsp baking powder
• quarter tsp salt
• 1 cup soya or rice milk

Ingredients (the other bits)

• 2 packets of vegan jelly crystals
• 2 pints of boiling water
• 1 tin of fruit in juice (drained)
• 1 carton of vegan vanilla soya dessert

Method (sponge)

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/375°F.
2. Mix the sugar and cornflour in a saucepan, then stir in the water, fruit and juice from the tin. Bring to the boil and cook over medium-high heat, stirring constantly, until the sauce is nice and thick. Pour into a large oven dish.
3. Mix the flour, 2 tablespoons of sugar, baking powder and salt in a large bowl, then stir in the soya or rice milk to form a batter. Drop by spoonfuls onto the hot fruit mixture and put into oven. Bake until golden brown (about 30 minutes).

Method (the other bits)

1. Hopefully the batter/sauce mixture will have risen nicely to form a wonderfully light fruit sponge, which makes a fantastic pudding in its own right. To use it as a trifle sponge divide it into at least 16 or more small pieces of sponge and fruity sauce and put these into two small-medium casserole dishes. Drain the tin of fruit and divide it between the two dishes. Make up the two lots of jelly and when the crystals are fully dissolved, add a pint of the liquid jelly to each dish.
2. Leave the dishes to cool and then set overnight in the fridge, adding a layer of vanilla soya dessert to each when solid.