The White Ramekins

food & photography

Pomegranate & Strawberry Roulade

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Pomegranate & Strawberry Roulade 4

A slice of cake can bring smiles on anyone’s face. At least it does to me. And things get special, when it’s a roulade. A super moist rolled cake filled with whipped cream and fresh fruits. More commonly, they are known as swiss rolls.

Pomegranate & Strawberry Roulade 2

This intense heat might have dampened my baking spirits causing me to resort to frozen treats from past few days, but that was just temporary. The baking spirits couldn’t be contained for long. And the outcome was this wonderful rolled cake, which ironically, I have been running away from a very long time.

Pomegranate & Strawberry Roulade

But I always wanted to give it a shot, but don’t know, why I hadn’t tried it yet. Anyhow, the moment of truth appeared eventually and I was elated to see this. To my amazement, it came out so well. No cracks, no tearing apart. Just beautiful feather touch texture and so light and airy.

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All thanks to Stephanie of JoyOfBaking. Her easy to follow and foolproof recipes would never fail you. Rather, you’ll feel confident to have beaten down one more complex recipe. At least I can vouch for her recipes and follow them blindfolded.

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I kept the filling to minimum, as I didn’t want to load it up with whipped cream and fruit jam, keeping the lightness of the cake intact. The sweet flavor of vanilla perfectly complimented the tart flavor of pomegranate and strawberry preserve. The cake is best served, the day it is made. And trust me, it wouldn’t last for long. I took this to my parents, and it was vanished pretty soon. And that brought even wider smile on my face. Isn’t it a win-win situation? So don’t stop here and bring smiles to people’s face!

Pomegranate & Strawberry Roulade 1

Sponge recipe adapted from JoyOfBaking

Ingredients

Sponge Cake
3 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
1/3 cup sifted cake flour
2 egg whites
3 tbsp cornstarch/cornflour
1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp white sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract or powder

Filling
1 cup diced strawberries, fresh or frozen
1/2 cup pomegranate juice
1/4 cup white sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup Sweetened Whipped Cream

Icing sugar for dusting

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven at 230 degree Celsius and line a 17 x 12 inch baking tray with parchment paper and grease the paper well. Keep aside.
  2. In a bowl, beat the 3 egg yolks and 2 whole eggs with 1/2 cup of sugar, until fluffy and pale.
  3. Beat in the vanilla extract.
  4. In another bowl, whisk together cake flour and cornstarch together and keep aside.
  5. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites till stiff peaks form.
  6. Fold the flour into 2 batches in egg and sugar batter carefully, until just flour is incorporated.
  7. Fold in the beaten egg whites, taking care not to over mix.
  8. Pour the batter into prepared baking tray and level it down with the help of a spatula. Bake for 6-8 minutes, until lightly browned.
  9. Dust the top of cake with some icing sugar. Spread and cover the cake with a clean kitchen towel.
  10. Invert the cake on to kitchen towel. Carefully peal off the parchment paper. Dust the cake with some icing sugar  and start rolling the cake along with towel. Let it cool completely with kitchen towel intact.
  11. Meanwhile, for filling, place all the ingredients in a sauce pan, except whipped cream and simmer at medium for 20 minutes. Keep stirring lightly in between. Once thick enough, chill in fridge.
  12. Once the cake is cooled, unroll it. Spread the whipped cream and then jam over the cake and roll back. Let it chill in fridge covered for 2 hours. Dust with icing sugar before serving.

Lemon Curd & Blueberry Gateau

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Lemon Curd & Blueberry Gateau 4

I am back with yet another recipe on lemons this month. Tart, citrus and refreshing juiciness of lemons is what goes really well with the contrasting hot scorching summer days. And lemons are the real saviors, when we have touched 37 degrees already here in Delhi. Good enough to keep us going.

Lemon Curd & Blueberry Gateau

I had some lemons left in fridge from the last week’s recipe, lemon drizzle cakelettes. And I had no clue, what to do with them except squeezing them over my salads or in my cool glass of lemonade. So, I whipped up some tangy, luscious lemon curd.

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The recipe was a no brainer and I was happy that I didn’t get any traces of scrambled eggs nor I felt the need of straining the curd. I just let that sit in fridge for a couple of days, before the weekend came. And I was all set to rock the kitchen.

Lemon Curd & Blueberry Gateau 3

It was Parul’s birthday when we last met at blogger’s table a week ago and sweet Ruchira made her a wonderful lemon ricotta and blueberry olive oil cake. Such a light and moist cake. It had me smitten. It feels so good that food brings people closer and inspires them.

Lemon Curd & Blueberry Gateau 1

Lemons and blueberries, a perfect pairing. And I knew, that I had to have baked a cake with these two wonderful fruits. And you know, how much I love baking with fruits.

Lemon Curd & Blueberry Gateau 2

Sadly, we don’t get fresh blueberries here in India, so I had to resort to frozen ones. And it didn’t matter much, as I cooked them into a compote. A generous squeeze of lemon juice, and the berries were back to life. Plump and lively.

Lemon Curd & Blueberry Gateau 5

For the cake, I made a sweet vanilla butter sponge cake, which complemented the tart lemon curd very well. A dollop of whipped cream and the blueberry compote made it more lavish and delish.

Lemon Curd & Blueberry Gateau 6

Lemon Curd, recipe adapted from JoyOfBaking.com

Ingredients

2 large eggs
100 gm granulated white sugar
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp butter

Instructions

  1. Whisk together eggs, sugar and lemon juice lightly in a bowl and let it sit on a double boiler on medium heat.
  2. Cook, stirring constantly (to prevent it from curdling), until the mixture becomes thick.
  3. It will take approximately 10 minutes.
  4. Once it becomes nice and thick (will coat the back of a spoon), remove it from the double boiler and add the butter and mix to incorporate it well into the lemon curd.
  5. Place a cling wrap directly over the lemon curd and refrigerate for up to a week.

Blueberry Compote

Ingredients

1 cup frozen blueberries
juice of one lemon
4 tbsp granulated white sugar

Instructions

  1. In a saucepan, add 1/2 cup of blueberries, lemon juice and sugar and mash the berries with the back of a spoon.
  2. Simmer the saucepan for 3-4 minutes until the sugar dissolves and the mixture starts to boil. Take off the heat and add remaining berries to the saucepan and let them sit for a while until the compote cools down completely.

Vanilla Sponge Cake

Ingredients

For The Cake
100 gm salted butter, room temperature, plus more for pan
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for pans
1 tsp tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature
3/4 cup low-fat buttermilk, room temperature
2 tsp pure vanilla extract

For The Filling
1/2 cup of lemon curd {recipe above}
blueberry compote {recipe above}
1 cup cold heavy cream
2 tbsp confectioners’ sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla powder/extract

Instructions

  1. For the cake: Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Butter a 9-inch round cake pans; dust with flour, tapping out excess.
  2. Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda in a bowl.
  3. Beat butter and sugar together in a bowl, until pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Fold in the flour mixture, alternating with buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour. Beat in vanilla.
  4. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake, about 40 minutes, until the skewer inserted in the middle of cake comes out clean. Transfer to wire rack, and let cool in pans for 20 minutes.
  5. Run a knife around edge of cake, and invert onto rack; and let cool completely.
  6. For the filling: Whisk cream with confectioners’ sugar until medium peaks form.
  7. Slice cakes in half horizontally. Spoon 1/2 of the whipped cream over bottom cake layer. Spread over the lemon curd. Top with remaining cake layer, pressing gently. Spoon over remaining whipped cream on top of the second cake layer and top with blueberry compote, letting all the juice drip down through the edges.

Lamingtons…The Aussie Petits Fours

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Lamingtons, these Australian miniature cakes have me completely smitten this time. Small genoise cubes dipped in chocolate icing and covered with snow-appearing shredded coconut. These mini bites are quite adorable, so much so that I like to call them the petits fours.

Their small size makes them perfect for a tea time snack. Plus, you can enjoy their choco-latey flavor without worrying much about the calorie intake. And the nutty flavor of coconut wedded with bitterness of dark chocolate is totally divine. It reminds me of those small Bounty bars, having oodles of sweet syrupy moist coconut trapped inside a milk chocolate.

In order to mimic the same moist texture, I thought of using a recipe from The Cake Bible, which I recently bought. And fortunately, this one is the first recipe {of a genoise/biscuit}, from this book which I have tried. Rose Beranbaum’s small tips and tricks helped a lot in achieving that extra bit of moistness. And why shouldn’t it be, after all those wonderful and important tips are from the veteran herself.

I iced them with the chocolate icing made of bittersweet chocolate and the cocoa powder. Cocoa added to chocolate perked the flavor of icing. And for the coconut, I went an extra mile and do the job of peeling the hard coconut and shredding it’s tender white flesh {got my finger hurt while doing that}. But trust me, store brought desiccated coconut wouldn’t have done that job, which the fresh one did. And that effort paid off well.

Genoise/Sponge Cake:

6 large eggs, at room temperature
3/4 cup (150 g) sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/3 cup (175 g) cake flour {i substituted this with 1 cup plain flour and 1/3 cup corn starch}
70 g melted clarified butter, at room temperature

Chocolate Icing:

170 g bittersweet chocolate, chopped
40 g unsalted butter
3/4 cup milk
2 cups icing sugar
2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted
2 tbsp boiling water
200 g unsweetened shredded coconut

Instructions

  1. For the genoise, butter and line a 9 inch square pan with parchment paper and keep aside {i used two 9 x 3 inch loaf pans instead}.
  2. In a clean bowl, beat eggs with sugar at high speed for 10 minutes, till you get a ribbon like texture. {I did this by hand wire whisk}.
  3. Add vanilla and mix well.
  4. Using a fine mesh strainer, sieve the flour and corn starch over the egg mixture and mix well, without beating too much and taking care not to over mix. Otherwise all the air entrapped will be lost.
  5. Scrape the mix into the pan and bake in preheated oven at 180 degree Celsius for 30 minutes or until the sponge pulls away from the sides of the pan.
  6. Take the cake out of oven and after 10 minutes take that out of the pan and let cool completely on a wire rack.
  7. For the icing, mix the chocolate, milk and butter in a bowl and heat in microwave till the chocolate gets dissolved.
  8. Sift in the cocoa powder and icing sugar and mix well.
  9. Cut the sponge carefully into two halves horizontally.
  10. Apply the chocolate icing over one half and sandwich the other half and cut into 16 small cubes.
  11. Add the boiling water to the remaining icing and mix well.
  12. Carefully holding the cakes, dip them into the icing and then roll all the surfaces over shredded coconut, taking one at a time. Let them stand on a wire rack for some time till the icing firms up.