Pina Colada Triffle

My husband loves to cook and for years complained that, although he got lots of complements, none of his co-workers believed he actually made his potluck offerings. Thankfully that changed when he switched to his current job about 2 years ago. He constantly has people asking for his recipes. The funny part is that he loves to experiment and usually can't remember exact measurements.

He is know for making delicious trifle style desserts and today I'm going to share how he makes them. If you scroll down a bit you'll see how we made a Pina Colada Trifle for his potluck at work today but first I want to talk a bit about choosing flavors. Even though the trifles we make follow a basic formula there is still a lot of experimentation with the flavors; you'll be able to use the method below to make a variety of desserts. Basically you need to choose 3 flavors: a cake flavor, a pudding flavor, and a fruit/ topping flavor. For example we made a trifle for Thanksgiving once that used spice cake, pumpkin pie pudding, and oatmeal nut crumble topping. Another example used homemade chocolate sour cream cake, cheesecake flavored pudding, and cherry topping.

Moving on to the recipe you have the same three components listed above and the assembly. Pictured below is everything you need to make our Pina Colada Trifle.

Step One: Cake

This can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be. Generally we use boxed cake mix but you could make it from scratch or even buy a premade angel food cake from the grocery store bakery. For this particular trifle we used white cake mix but replaced the water called for with the juice from two cans of crushed pineapple and a bit of coconut rum.

Step Two: Pudding

To make the pudding layer you need a box of instant pudding mix, a package of cream cheese, and a tub of whipped topping. Whip the pudding mix and cream cheese together using either a hand mixer or a stand mixer. Add a little bit of milk if needed to make it nice and fluffy. Then fold in half of the whipped topping with a spatula. This recipe used coconut cream pudding.

Step Three: Topping

This will vary depending on what flavors you decided to go with. Mostly we have used fruit topping but we've also used nut and oat streusel, caramel sauce, and hot fudge. Fruit topping can be fresh fruit, fruit that you cook down so it has a little syrup, or even just canned pie filling. This trifle uses canned crushed pineapple.

Step Four: Assembly

To assemble your dessert just layer everything. We are very lucky to have round cake pans that fit into our trifle dish with minimum trimming. If you aren't as fortunate just cut the cake into squares and create a layer of cubes on the bottom layer. Top that off with half the pudding and then half the fruit. Repeat all the layers and finish with the remaining whipped topping and garnish as desired. We topped this with both regular and toasted coconut.