I was inspired by the Great British Bake Off to make a swiss roll. As a child, I loved the overly sweet chocolate “snail cake” my Mum would sometimes get. We never made them at home they were “too hard” to make. Spoiler: They’re not that hard. Sure, my first attempt could have looked much better (rather than looking like a hunk of my thigh), but it tasted good. I wanted a pink sponge using fresh strawberries (I had 2kg of jamming strawberries to use) with white chocolate filling, and do you think I could find a recipe?! So this on is cobbled together from a few different places: the basic recipe from Taste.com, the idea and ratio of strawberry sauce from Sugar Geek Show and the recipe for the cream from Carve Your Craving. Here is the recipe I ended up with.
Using the strawberries that I had was important. I love using fresh ingredients rather than pre-processed stuff–if I had the time and ability I would probably make my own flour! That’s never going to happen, but I can do strawberry flavouring myself. I had actually make strawberry topping from Sally’s Baking Addiction, and after finding the recipe from Sugar Geek, I decided that using directly fresh strawberries wouldn’t be a great idea. Instead, I spooned out 5 tablespoons (as in, spoons, not the measurement) of the sauce and sieved it to remove chunks and seeds. I was concerned that it would make my roll too wet, but the batter was fine and the cake tasted great.
I followed the steps for creating the sponge to the letter (and added in my sauce), and I was surprised at the thickness/depth of the sponge. But after baking, that’s where I panicked a little. I didn’t read the recipe properly and used my own knowledge of how to roll these things. So I rolled it straight away, because that is meant to make it easier. However where a recipe says “roll along the long side” it doesn’t mean tuck under the long side and have the swirl on the short side…Oops. I didn’t have the lovely swirl. So I unrolled it. It was sticky and ended up splitting a bit, but I managed to unroll it with minimal damage. I then rolled it the correct way…but still without the sugar. For those who are oblivious like I was, the sugar helps to dry out the outside of the roll and stops it being so sticky. So I finally got my sponge rolled, and I set it aside to cool.
Time for the filling. It was a very simple mix of white chocolate and cream. Everything was going swimmingly except my hand mixer was taking aagesssss to whip my cream/chocolate. So I put it in my food processor (which had a whisk attachment) and let it go. Guess what I ended up with! Butter! Yum! Just what you want in a sweet swiss roll. Or not. It was pretty gross honestly. So that went in the bin and I went to bed, thinking about how I would do it better for dinner the next day.
The solution was obvious: Do it AT dinner! I figured using the stick blender I have always used should help me make thick cream, not butter. It did not. Even though I did the first step of melting the chocolate and cream together about 8 hours before I whipped it (giving it plenty of time to cool), I still almost made butter when I whipped it. It was decent enough to put on the sponge, so I slathered it on, rolled up the sponge and voila! One white choc and strawberry swiss roll. It tasted pretty good. Not amazing, but there was only 1 slice left, which I am pretty happy with. I think next time I’ll use a bit more chocolate in the cream. The sponge was very sweet, so I’ll need to think of another way to make that work.
Beth's Baking 