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.

I’m back! But just because all is quiet on the blog front doesn’t mean I haven’t been cooking! I have tried a few different things out, but I have always wanted to make Orange and Almond cake. I first had this cake 8 years ago, when I worked in a small bakery. I had recently found out that I am intolerant to wheat, so I was super excited to find a delicious, moist, gluten free cake. Well, I finally made it myself and it turned out pretty well. I used this site as a basis for my recipe. Continue reading to see the baking journey (not too many photos, sorry!) or just skip straight to the recipe!

Orange and Almond cake has no wheat flour and uses the whole orange. Before trying this recipe I had no idea how expensive almond meal is! Sorry Mum! But it is definitely worth it for this cake as almond meal lends a nutty taste to the tart citrus of the oranges. The oranges I used were juicing oranges–they were super sour! (Despite my future father-in-law insisting that they are sweet). I am very lucky to have access to organic oranges, picked straight from the tree. But really any orange will do (though preferably unblemished).

You start by boiling the life out of the oranges. Remove the green stem bit and wash to your satisfaction. I used a pressure cooker and it took 20 minutes once it reached full pressure. Recipes otherwise suggest about 2 hours on the stove top. When cooked, the oranges should become soft and squishy. I didn’t want to wait for them to cool, so I used tongs to remove them from the pot and hold them as I cut the oranges into quarters. Remove any seeds, then you blend the life out of them! Yup, the peel, pith and flesh all get blended together. Smoother is better, but you may still see small “chunks” of peel (5mm by 5mm and very thin). Don’t worry, these kinda disappear once baked.

Beat the heck out of the eggs–they turn lighter in colour and will thicken but nowhere near as much as if they were just egg whites. Mix everything together (I used 2/3 cup of sugar and 1/3 cup of icing sugar…I kinda ran out…oops), pop it into a lined pan and cook. It doesn’t rise, so I could have made both these cakes into one. It ended up being kinda sour, but seemed to sweeten after a few days. It’s been over a week and my cake is still in the fridge and lookin’ fine, so there’s no need to rush eating it!

Bake on,

Beth x

I often cook something for family dinners, but sometimes they don’t go as planned. My cinnamon scrolls became a bit burnt on the base, so I nearly made something completely different. However I ran out of time and ingredients, so my family had slightly burnt scrolls. I ended up finishing off the banana cake I started though.

I planned to make a banana cake and use the cream cheese frosting from the cinnamon scrolls. I creamed butter, sugar and egg together and I started mashing bananas. They weren’t ripe enough 😥. So I put the mix aside to be used later.

When my bananas were ready, I wasn’t. It was late at night and I didn’t have the hour needed to cook a full cake. So instead of putting it off again, I made cupcakes instead! Being smaller, they took about 15 minutes to cook.

I also had some left over chocolate. Normally chocolate wouldn’t last long around me, but I’m trying to improve my eating habits. So the chocolate was chopped up and plonked on top of the cupcake/muffins. Best. Decision. Ever. The chocolate went beautifully with the banana but didn’t overpower it.

After setting a couple aside for personal eating, I took the rest into work to be devoured by my fellow scientists. I was told I could bring them in anytime!

Bake on,

Beth

This week’s experiment was Cinnamon Scrolls. I looked up recipes and the first four were all the same. I liked the explanation from Fun, Cheap or Free the best. Now, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, because one site said this recipe takes 45 mins to make. It took me more like 3 hours. Most of that was waiting for my bread machine to do it’s thing, but I’m glad I started these early!

First off, I added everything to the bread machine (after a early morning walk to the ahops for some milk) and waited for 1.5 hours while it kneeded the dough and allowed it to rise. The dough then needed to be rolled out into a rectangle. I don’t have a rolling pin, so I improvised (See the jar at the top of the pic? Yeah. That.). I smooshed margerine all over it with my fingers, as Fun, Cheap or Free suggests, which was totally fun but the end result was…messy.

Sprinkle the cinnamon and brown sugar mix over with a sieve and roll the dough! I cut each roll to be about 2cm wide…tall?…long? Anyway I got a lovely even 21 scrolls out of this recipe! I let them sit in a warm oven for about 15 minutes (I couldn’t wait the suggested 30 minutes. I wanted my scrolls!). They cooked for about 20 minutes, but didn’t brown. To check if they were cooked, I cut into one of them. Is there a better way? I’ve never made dough things before! Besides pizza. Mmmm… pizza…

While the scrolls were cooking, I mixed about four fifths of a philly cheese block, one cup of icing mix and a glob of butter together to make the delicious icing. The icing had a slightly tart taste using this ratio, which I thought offset the sweetness of the sugar piled into the scrolls.

They’re best served warm, either straight out of the oven or microwaved for 20 seconds, as I discovered the next day ;). Probably some icecream would be amazing, but I haven’t tried that…yet. I was too busy eating them to take a pic of the final product 😛

Bake on,

Beth x