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"

Fun Dessert Times! Featuring: Trifle!

A couple weeks ago, I embarked on a delicious culinary adventure - Trifle! If you do not know what that is, it is a layered dessert with whipped cream, custard, some sort of cake or cookie thing, and various fruit. It even has a special bowl that I bought from Target to display all the delicious layers. This was inspired by my mom, who made a trifle because she "had some leftover egg yolks". Other people make omelets, we apparently make trifle.

So I'll start with the difficult part - making your own custard (you can also totally buy this at the store, but that doesn't require reading a cooking blog either). This recipe is stolen from a book called BakeWise by Shirley O. Corriher. If you interested in the science behind baking, you might want to read it. Personally, I like the idea of learning the science behind baking better than actually learning it. Anyway, custard.

You start with a vanilla bean, which is one of the coolest things in a spice cabinet. You awkwardly pry it open to reveal the pretty black stuff inside, which you scrape into a saucepan. It's very satisfying.



Then you drop the rest of the bean in there (to be fished out later) and 1 cup of whole milk and 1/2 cup of heavy whipping cream. Heat these over medium heat until it just begins to steam.



While that's happening, stir 1/3 cup of sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 3 tablespoons cornstarch in aother saucepan. Also, get a bowl and mix 5 large egg yolks together in it. (The whites make a nice healthy omelet for later). Put that bowl aside.




Return to the first saucepand and take out the vanilla bean (which can probably be used again, if you want to save it). Drizzle the hot liquid into the second saucepan, which whisking. Return the saucepan, which now has all the delicious things in it, to the heat. Stir it constantly until the mixture thickens.




Once that's happened, scoop about 1/4 cup of the hot mixture and mix it in the with egg yolks, then put it all back in the saucepan. Return everything to the heat once more and bring it to a boil. Stir constantly and let it boil for a couple minutes (apparently, says Shirley, this kills the enzymes in the egg that make the custard thin later).

When it is thick and smooth and all the enzymes are dead, transfer it to a bowl, cover the surface of it with plastic wrap, and refrigerate. This is also the time to add any extra flavors if you want to. Let it cool for a couple hours and then come back and do the rest of your trifle



...


Now the super-easy-fun-part!

Take the rest of your carton of whipping cream (or a new carton of whipping cream, if you want lots, like me) and pour it into a nice, big bowl. Add some powdered sugar, to taste (I did 3 tablespoons). Turn on your electric mixer (or get a friend with a whisk and lots of endurance) and mix the cream until it forms peaks in the bowl that can stay up but are still delicate.



Take your cake/cookie/bread and cut it up into cubes. Traditional things for this layer are ladyfinger cookies or angel food cake or pound cake. I used Greenlee's Cinnamon Bread, which is some delicious bread from a nice bakery in San Jose. I also toasted it to make sure it didn't get soggy, which worked very well (I don't know if it would have gotten soggy anyway, but I really hate that so it was good to be sure).



Finally, cut up your fruit. I used strawberries and raspberries, but you can really use anything. Mine were farmer's market delicious, which is a benefit of spring-time trifle.



Such bright and delicious friends! Soon we will grow some in our garden and eat them too!



Now, you assemble it layer by layer in a trifle bowl or some other, less awesome bowl. I don't know if there is some special patterns for the layers, but I just did them randomly and it was fine, especially because I had disproportionate amounts of each thing.



Tada! This was crazy good, you should definitely try to make some!