Strawberry jam swiss roll
I appreciate that it takes practice to be good at something, yet I can’t help feeling disappointed when encountering imperfection in my baking result, even for first attempt such as this one. I only started baking recently. There are so many recipes to try but only limited time to do so. Therefore I can’t afford to have to repeat a recipe again and again. However, sometimes repeating is inevitable. I just have to accept it as a learning process, for example making swiss roll because there are a few things that can easily go wrong, and you have to make it once before you know the traps.
The outcome is actually not a total failure, but there are a few things that need to be improved: cake a bit too dry to my liking, the filling too sweet, the skin of the cake stuck to the kitchen towel when being rolled, and it’s sticky because of the icing sugar. The recipe is not to be blamed because I have so much faith in it. The only way to prove that the flaws occurred during the baking process is to try it again, and try I will.
The recipe below is as per the cook book, but where I adjusted the ingredients, I marked them in italics.
Ingredients:
140 gr plain flour (120 gr)
55 gr unsalted buttter (45 gr)
1/2 tsp salt (1/4 tsp)
6 eggs (5 eggs)
164 gr sugar (125 gr)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup icing sugar
3/4 cup strawberry jam
How to:
1. Heat the oven to 180 C.
2. Grease a swiss roll pan sized 46cm x 31 cm (42 cm x 30 cm), cover all sides with baking paper. Set aside.
3. Melt butter in a medium bowl and set aside.
3. Place 1/2 cup of water in a saucepan and let it simmer.
4. Place eggs and sugar in a glass or stainless bowl, and whisk until combined. Place bowl over the simmering water and continue whisking until the egg temperature hits 43C.
5. Remove from the heat and continue whisking with an electric mixer, medium high speed, until pale and thick, approximately 6-8 minutes.
6. Transfer 1 cup of the mixture into the melted butter, stir until combined.
7. Fold flour into the egg mixture (point 5 above) carefully not to deflate the batter.
8. Lastly, fold the egg and butter mixture (point 6 above) into mixture from no 7.
9. Pour the mixture to the swiss roll pan. Use an offset spatula to push the mixture against the sides and into the corners of the pan, and smooth the top.
10. Bake until the cake is deep golden brown, springs back lightly when pressed with a finger, and is beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan, about 25 minutes.
11. Sift icing sugar over a kitchen towel. When the cake is done, invert the cake onto the towel. Remove the baking paper the cake was based on. Trim 0.5 cm from all sides of the cake.
12. With the short side of the cake close to you, hold the kitchen towel edge and start rolling the cake and towel together to the other end of the cake. Set the cake aside on a rack, seam side down until cool for about 10 minutes.
13. Unroll the cake, spread a thin layer over the cake, leaving 2.5 cm border around the edges.
14. Reroll the cake gen, carefully peeling off the kitchen towel as you roll.
