Birthday cake trifle

Technology is well and truly conspiring against me at the moment. Nothing in my life works properly. We've bought a newfangled tablet thing, which doesn't seem to do anything useful. My macbook is so old that it's about to claim its bus pass, my phone hasn't been updated for so long that it's simply refusing to do anything, and the DVD player has now decided it doesn't like DVDs. And nothing rivals Ben's laptop, which has half a screen and no keyboard. Everything media based seems to involve connecting one crappy piece of hardware to another, to share around the elements of it which aren't crappy.

The tip of the iceberg is that the oven seems to have gone on the blink. Now I'm not entirely sure if this is just my paranoia, it's not clapped out completely or anything, but something has definitely changed since we moved house. Things only seem to cook if they're on the top shelf, and then they cook a little too much. If you put anything on the bottom shelf then you might as well just stand there and breath heavily on it for two hours

*Insert something about bad workman, blame and tools*

All this resulted in me well and truly shitting-up Ben's birthday cake a few weeks ago. A simple victoria sponge and I couldn't get it right. It overflowed like some sort of eggy magma, covering the entire bottom of the oven. And I've only just plucked up the enthusiasm to clean it, because oven cleaning just isn't something I think anyone should ever have to do ever.

I couldn't face trying to make it look presentable as a cake, but nor could I bear to throw it in the bin. If I were clever I would have marketed it to the crowd as 'Deconstructed Birthday Cake', but really it's a fucking trifle. And it doesn't really warrant a blog post, as the recipe is just throwing a bunch of stuff together, but it's a handy thing to have in your head, should you similarly shit-up a cake...

Birthday cake trifle

One layer of sponge cake (2 eggs, 4oz stork, 4oz caster sugar, 4oz self-raising flour, 1tsp vanilla extract - all mixed together and cooked in a greased tin for about 30 mins, gas mark 3)
1 bag of frozen fruit, defrosted - mine was optimistically labelled 'summer fruits'
2 shots of creme de cassis (optional)
300ml double cream
2tbsp icing sugar
1 pot of fancy shop bought custard
Handful of toasted almonds

Now, my trifle doesn't have jelly in, because jelly is rank, but you can add some in if you're a bit twisted.

Line the bottom of a deep bowl with the sponge cake. Mix the fruit with the creme de cassis and then spoon over the sponge.  Next the custard.  Whip the double cream with the icing sugar, and use to top. Scatter over the chopped almonds and chill for a couple of hours.