I bought 4 lbs of white peaches but they weren't quite ripe, so I set them upside down on a cotton tea towel and covered them with the same until they ripened. This took three days. The skin appearance didn't bother me that much, as I would blanch and peel that off when they were ripe...
I sliced a little cross into the bottom of the peaches and put them in boiling pot of water for a minute or so. Then I removed them with a slotted spoon and dropped them into ice water.
I noticed as I did, that under that skin the peaches some were indeed white while others were not even though I thought I was buying all white peaches. It was ok because I wanted colour and the white ones would have been lacking in that.
I used the trifle dish to cut out the pie rounds and put them on parchment paper on my biggest baking sheet in the house.
Then I brushed them with egg and sprinkled, cinnamon, sugar & ginger on them. I baked them for 20 minutes as per the recipe and then put the sheet on a wire rack to cool.
There was LOTS of dough leftover - I would have to think of something to do with it another time...
On three peaches (the white ones), the skin fell off in one swoop of touching it, the other five, I had to peel it all off with a paring knife and that was much more difficult than expected. It was easy to get the pit out of those three white peaches too, but not the others, I had to cut slices off until only the pit was left which were uneven and not very pretty looking. With the white ones, I cut them in half, removed the pit and then cut each half into nice slices.
This all went into a pot with a cup of apricot jam (this is the only difference I did from what the recipe called for - it called for peach preserves/jam), lemon zest, sugar, almond extract and cinnamon. I simmered as the recipe said for 40 minutes and then cooled it down in a Ziploc container in the fridge for an hour and a half. Then they were still warm, so had to put in the freezer for another half hour.
So, the recipe says total time is an hour an ten minutes, but it took me much longer than that...It was two hours till I got the peaches simmering on the stove. Whip cream wasn't even started at this point and of course I had to wait for the "cool down".
When the peaches went in the freezer, I started the whip cream. I just used a hand blender and used vanilla and icing sugar as the recipe stated. It took about ten minutes. I covered it and put it in the fridge.
I toasted some almond slivers in a non-stick frying pan.
Instead of dried apricots for garnish, I finely chopped up some Maynards Fuzzy Peach candy and mixed it with the almonds.
I only ended up using half of what I took out of the bag - they are hard to chop up!
Here's the thing, as pretty as it looked and mine didn't look anywhere near as pretty as the recipe picture - I didn't know how to serve it...should I try and cut/scoop all the way down to the bottom? Just start with a layer at a time? I decided on just a layer at a time as that seemed the easiest. Maybe this dish is all just about presentation in the trifle bowl?
So, I'll end with just that...I doubt I will ever make this again, but I think I redeemed myself from last year's peach cobbler failure...If I do make it, I will make sure they're all "white" peaches and get those ready the night before. I started this dish at 5pm and it wasn't ready to serve until 10:30pm and OMG, what a lot of dishes! I think my son finished his serving in about under a minute. It felt like I just gave it to him, sat down to rest and then he was putting the empty bowl in the kitchen. He told me he was going to have some for breakfast. :)
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