Strawberry Almond Roulade and Little Bee

I made a strawberry roulade from a squishy pink baking book that Bridget brought home from work! It is all gone already, that is how delicious it is (was). Make it and see for yourself!

The Prep: Heat your oven to 425 degrees. Take a jelly roll pan (or something 14x10 inches (ish) and line it with parchment paper. This is going in the oven, so don't cheat and use wax. Go out and buy some parchment. It's August and I had to bicycle to the store to get some, so I don't wanna hear you complaining.

The first step is making the spongy cake part. Start with a pot with some water in it. Put that on the stove and heat it up while you find a nice heat-proof bowl to put on top of the pot, so the bottom of the bowl is in the pot but not touching the water. Now put 3 eggs and 2/3 of a cup of sugar into the heat-proof bowl and whisk them until everything is warm and thick and mixed. Don't cook the eggs though.



Action shot!

Take that off the heat and get another bowl with a little bit less than 1 cup of flour. Be sure and sift this pretty well, because you will be folding the eggy sugar mixture into this and you want as few lumps as possible. Okay, now you can fold the eggy sugar mixture into the flour. Add 1 tbsp of hot water to the mix as well.



Pour the mixture into the pan and pop it in the oven for 8-10 minutes, until golden and springy.



Meanwhile, you can make the filling by mixing 3/4 of a cup of mascarpone cheese with 1 tsp almond extract. I added some sliced strawberries as well, and then sliced some more strawberries in another bowl to put on top of the filling. I really love strawberries.



When the cake is done, turn it out on a fresh piece of parchment paper and peel the old, oven-y parchment paper off.



Roll the cake up in a spiral, with the fresh paper to keep it from sticking. Wrap it in a dishtowel and wait for it to cool. Meanwhile, let the filling get cool in the fridge.



Wait a couple hours and pull everything out to assemble. Unroll the cake bit and spread the filling on it. Drop some sliced strawberries on the filling and roll it all back up. For extra decoration, add slivered almonds on top.







Yum!

Last night I finished Little Bee, a novel by Chris Cleave. It is about a young woman from Nigeria and a less-young woman from England. It's about a lot of other things too, but it is a story that I was told not to spoil by explaining. Suffice to say that it was beautiful and heartbreaking and please enjoy this, one of my favorite passages from it: "We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived"