Strawberry Swiss Roll

Tis the season to be eating strawberries & naval oranges. Around this time of the year, all fruit sellers are selling these 2 types of fruits at very low prices. The cheapest I've seen for strawberries is 79 cents for a 250gm punnet and if you buy 2, it's only $1.50. Naval oranges are the sweetest and juicest oranges around. Right now, we can get 3kg packs for as low as $1.99 each.

We usually use the oranges to make fresh orange juice. As for the strawberries, there are many ways of eating them. Usually I just slice it up and eat them with chocolate dips as some of them are not very sweet. Or I'll open a can of peaches and have a fruit salad. My favourite is to add them to strawberry ice-cream. Combined with peaches and some bananas, it'll beat Swensens sundae anytime!! Last night, I threw some strawberries into the blender with ice-cream and some milk for a very fruity strawberry milk shake....delicious! Worse case, if I can't finish up the strawberries, I'll just make them into jam. Luckily both my sons like strawberries and orange juice, so in whatever form, I'm happy to see them enjoy the vitamin c rich fruits.

I tried to make a strawberry swiss roll today. I have on hand fresh strawberries and half a block of Philadelphia cream cheese so I thought of making a cream cheese filling with chopped strawberries for the swiss roll. I was really scared because I have a poor track record with making sponge cakes. It almost always falls flat and often dry. See my previous post on Lamingtons.

I researched several recipes and decided to use the recipe from a cookbook I own. It uses less sugar, no butter (more healthy) and also calls for self-raising flour. I thought this might improve my chances of a more fluffy cake. My recipe asks for the eggs to be separated but interestingly, some other recipes don't.

I carefully followed the recipe, whipping up the egg whites, gradually adding in the sugar and the egg yolks, one at a time, until the part where I'm supposed to "gently fold" in the flour and hot milk. This is where I'm most panicky. What exactly does "gently fold" means? I tried to be light handed but the flour does not get incorporated so I got to keep folding and folding. And I think that's how I end up deflating the egg mixture. Plus, I tried to warm up the milk in the microwave but I overset the timing and the milk boiled all over inside the microwave. I guess I lost precious time there, mopping up the mess and reheating another bowl of milk. Grr...it's so frustrating.

Inside the oven, my swiss roll looked so ugly. In my haste not to lose anymore time, I didn't spread the mixture evenly across the pan, so the cake looked like some fat woman's lumpy tummy or cellulite sweltering in the oven's heat....haha! I took care not to overbake it, so it the nice brown colour when it came out kind of made the uneven height not too obvious. Unfortunately, the texture is very coarse....I still haven't got it :( And even more unfortunately, I used some lousy baking paper (never gonna buy that again) that stuck to the nice brown skin of the swiss roll and tore off almost everything when I unrolled the cake. It's the ugliest swiss roll I've ever seen. It need emergency cosmetic surgery. So I whipped up some more cream and covered it from head to toe. Now it's looking better with the beautiful bright red strawberries and mint leaves decoration.

The cream cheese and strawberry filling is very nice, but it's a little runny and I don't know why. With the layer of fresh cream cover, I give myself 50/100 for my swiss roll. 40 points for decoration, 10 points for the damned cake. Got to try harder.