Mind you, I don't intend to try making it again for a while. No, I thought I'd try my hand at rolling normal cake instead. I followed a recipe from the masters of patisserie - the Roux brothers. This was quite a complicated affair - I had to make fruit coulis, and to make that I had to make a sweet syrup.
The recipe was for a chocolate roulade with raspberries. Whilst the beautifully airy sponge sat in the oven, I reread the recipe. Make sure that the cake is springy but cooked else it will stick to the teatowel. Right. Much prodding of the sponge followed. Definitely springy. A real king size trampoline of sponges. At this point I had some sort of premonition but I ignored these feelings of doubt and pulled the cake out of the oven. I plonked it upside down onto a clean teatowel and left it to cool on a rack.
There was just a small feeling of deja vu as I whipped up some cream and slathered it onto my slab of choccie cake. Even more so as I then sprinkled raspberries over the top (god I love raspberry season). With a small feeling of trepidation I lifted the end of the teatowel to roll the roulade. And then the cream started splurging out of the sides. And the cake stuck fast to the teatowel like fluff to sellotape. It was a delicate operation of gently peeling sponge and trowelling cream back into this chocolate log. I managed to get the ends together and the teatowel off, only the join was on the top and the whole thing too delicate to even roll on the plate! *sigh*
I don't think I'm going to be selling many roulades in the future somehow...
I managed to invert the roulade using the age-old trick of sticking a plate over the top and flipping the whole thing over. My creation looked a little sorry for itself. It certainly didn't much resemble the manufactured Swiss Rolls in Tesco.
After all that hard work I sifted some icing sugar over the top and rewarded myself a piece. It was absolutely divine tasting. And actually, when I cut it, it didn't look half bad!
