This Holiday Showstopper Checks Every Box

The usual advice when making custard is to avoid a hard boil. That’s because too much heat can cause its egg proteins to tightly coagulate and clump together instead of loosely linking into a tender gel. But curdling isn’t a concern here: There’s plenty of liquid diluting the proteins, so they have less opportunity to bond, and the abundant starch from both the cornstarch and cocoa powder also hinders the proteins from linking by thickening the mixture. If anything, the risk is undercooking the custard, which would render it too runny to properly thicken and set up once it’s chilled. So boil away.

Assembling the components in a certain order—fruit, cake, custard, cream—maximizes the trifle’s visual and textural appeal. 

Airy whipped Cream; festive Chocolate Decorations You can take your trifle from sumptuous to spectacular by making some striking (but simple) chocolate decorations. Or, for understated elegance, skip the decorations and just whip cream with some sugar—but don’t whip the top layer of cream until the day you’re serving the trifle. 

Silky Dark-Chocolate custard Bar chocolate packs richness, body, and big chocolate flavor, but too much of it makes for gritty custard because of its high proportion of cocoa butter. Cocoa powder contains much less cocoa butter but lacks chocolaty richness. Together, though, they make a great team. A couple tablespoons of cocoa powder whisked into the custard base gave it depth. Then I added 4 ounces of a chopped bittersweet chocolate bar along with some butter for more richness and body, as well as vanilla extract and espresso powder to give the chocolate flavor a roasty, toasty boost.

 Resilient, Quick-to-Make Chiffon Chiffon cake is ideal for trifle: Its egg-fortified structure remains intact even as it absorbs raspberry juice and rum. Its vegetable oil–enriched crumb stays softer in a chilled dessert than a butter cake would. And if you bake it in a rimmed baking sheet, it cooks and cools quickly and is easy to cut into flat, even squares for arranging in the trifle bowl. 

Bright, Cohesive Raspberry Filling Whole berries taste vibrant but lack cohesion, so I made a chunky compote. Half the berries (frozen fruit works well here) went into a bowl while I mashed and simmered the rest with a little sugar and cornstarch to help the juice thicken. Then I combined the two so that the juicy mash was punctuated with whole berries: a multitextured filling that hydrated the cake nicely and contrasted with the rich chocolate custard and cream.