Birthday Month

In my family, July is a very busy birthday month. My birthday, my brother's and my dad's are all within 5 days of one another. Often we will get together to celebrate them all at once. This year, instead of a cake I made a "Stars and Stripes Trifle."

The stars are store bought pound cake sliced and made into sandwiches with raspberry jam as the filling. Then you use a cookie cutter to cut out the stars. I didn't have a small enough star cutter, so we had to freehand them. The stripes are berries and pastry cream. The assembly had an interesting tip that I will use from now on when I put together a trifle. I used the leftover scraps from the star cutouts to fill in the center of the trifle. This way you don't have to spend so much on berries. It just looks like a lot. The cake is the best part anyway, and this way there's more of it.