A Victorian recipe reborn -- summer pudding!

Summer pudding.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

It's "too darn hot" around here! Yet, there are festivities where sweet things are expected.  Ice cream and popsicles are always a good thing (I keep a box of popsicles or fudgesicles in the freezer all summer), but what if you want something a little more elegant, but you don't want to heat up the house?  Summer pudding is a refreshing, no-bake, party-worthy dessert.  Opinions differ as to the origins of the recipe; it seems to be a late-Victorian Trifle combined with a Charlotte.  No matter; it's delicious, and easy, and involves 2 minutes of simmering on the stove, so your house stays cool!  I made a summer pudding for a party on the 4th of July, and it went over really well.  Here is the recipe I used, based on a recipe from a book by Elizabeth David, posted to the Leite's Culinaria blog:

12 oz. frozen sweetened raspberries (thawed)
1 box fresh raspberries
1/2 lb. fresh sweet cherries (pitted)
2 Tablespoons plum jam (could use raspberry or strawberry)
1/4 cup sugar
1 loaf sliced white bread, day-old or dried slightly in the oven, crusts trimmed
heavy cream

Gluten-free cuccidate: can it be done?

My regular cuccidate.

I love to bake traditional treats during the holidays.  So far, I've done gingerbread cake (recipe from good old Betty Crocker), nut-free fruitcake with dried fruit instead of candied fruit, cake mix cookies made with a spice cake mix and topped with cinnamon red hot candy, my great aunt's cocoa-anise cookies, and my nut-free version of cuccidate, or Sicilian fig cookies.  I bake so that I can have some good things, but not *the whole batch* and so that I will have something to give to my adult relatives (I only buy gifts for the kids).  My aunt and cousin, however, have multiple food allergies (as I do, but they have different ones than I have) and they almost never get to eat baked goods because their allergies include wheat, gluten, yeast, eggs, dairy (except they can have butter, weirdly enough), corn (both starch and syrup) and cane sugar.