Pudding worries, please help!

[AnonymousBird]

I love cooking, but am hopeless at coming up with good puddings. I need to do a pudding for DH's 40th meal, feeding 16 and it needs to be so so so easy, but hopefully a bit interesting and appealing as well! Prep in advance essential. Feeding a mixture of adults and children.

Also offering cheese, biscuits and fruit so doesn't need to be massive, just something that I can just put together quickly and leave until ready to serve.

I recently made a tasty key lime pie, but my flan dish is too small for this time, and I don't have time to get a bigger one. PLUS all my pressed in biscuits around the edge did collapse a bit, so not sure about doing that one again.

I have a magimix if that makes any difference, though not yet very expert at using it!

HELP!

trifle

Definitely trifle.

I don't have a suitable dish! As always, I've left planning the pudding to the very last minute (head in the sand approach) and I need to order the ingredients for my morning delivery! Agghhh.

Thanks though, but even trifle does scare me I'll be honest.

For a large group I usually make a pavlova. I make a big meringue nest, (I don't bother to pipe it, just spread out a flat circle and make a bit of a wall all round with teaspoonfuls of meringue), bake it gently in a very low oven on greaseproof paper, leave to cool, then slide it on to a large plate and fill it, not too long in advance, with whipped cream and top with strawberries or raspberries.
Another easy one is to layer whipped cream, which can be combined with yoghurt or sour cream, with fruit (raspberries are good though my favourite is fresh figs) and dark brown sugar. You put about three or four layers in total, first the fruit, then the cream, then the sugar into a glass bowl so you can see the sugar dribbling down through the layers and leave in the fridge overnight.

Open fruit tart using shop-bought puff pastry. Fill a baking sheet and serve on a chopping board (best to prepare the board with lemon juice to remove fish/onion flavours). Serve with whipped cream or crème fraiche.

I'd do a pav as well. You can make the meringue a few days in advance and keep in air-tight box. Then on morning of lunch, chop up some fruit, and whip cream, and keep separate. Then slap them all together at serving.

I'd also do somthing chocolately - eg a choc tart. Doing 2 puds means that a smaller tin is fine... this is a Mary Berry recipe that I saw that looks nice, and it will be foolproof form her. Could use shopbought, pre-rolled shortcrust for extra ease.

4merly - that's it. Your idea sprung me straight back to a yummy puff pastry galette from one of Nigella's books which is dead easy, just needs shoving in the oven 15 mins before eating.

Allelluyah. I shall sleep tonight.

Emily - I can do a pavlova, one of my (very few) pudding staples, just that the mob who are coming this time got pavlova last time so I wanted to pull something different out of the bag!!! Thanks for the idea though, I agree it's a great one to do in advance for larger numbers.

The tart idea sounds great. I often do a pavlova for my French neighbours as they never seem to do it here (in fact it always seems to be rice pudding or apple crumble).
We are going out with the half the village next week and I have just found out that the chef's speciality is tripes a la mode de Caen. I shan't tell OH in advance. Yuck.
I am sure your party will be much nicer.