Swiss Roll

Happy Memorial Day!  It's another beautiful sunny day here in San Diego!  Oh, what I would give to just lounge around the house, do a few rounds of baking, and then go back to my vegetative state.  Instead, I'm stuck here at work, munching on guacamole and chips and those Mexican sweet breads (conchas).  That's ok though..I figure today can be one of those "productive" days.  I'm planning on making a list of all the goodies I've been itching to make, that way I can slowly knock them out, one by one,  I feel like I haven't really been doing a whole lot of baking lately.  Or, at least, not a whole lot of different kinds of goods.  So, this past weekend, I tried my hands at making swiss rolls (or jelly rolls, as they're called here in the states...apparently, the English calls them swiss rolls, we Yanks call them jelly rolls, and the ever so fancy French calls them roulades).  Yep, I did my homework!

Strawberries are in season right now so I decided to do a strawberry whipped cream swiss roll.  I originally was just going to do whipped cream but it seemed kind of boring...plus, I had whole box of these beauties!  Swiss rolls aren't as difficult as they seem.  I used my go-to chiffon recipe and baked it in a half sheet pan.  It was perfect.  My recipe was exactly enough for the half sheet pan, which was a relief for me!  You see, the oven at home is a really, really, really small oven.  I'm talking about, it fits one (one!) half sheet pan.  And just barely too!  I'm not too crazy about baking more than one pan in the oven and doing the whole rotating thing.  I find that something always goes wrong when I do that.  Always.  Anyways, enough with the small rant...what I started to say was: I'm glad my recipe was enough for one sheet...I hate wasting and there would've been no way for me fit more pans in that oven!

I had wanted to slice up strawberries and place them in the filling, but I wasn't sure how difficult it would have been to re-roll my cake.  Instead, I pulverized the strawberries and added a layer on top of the whipped cream and then rolled up my cake.  The tricky thing with the swiss roll was making sure I didn't add too much filling.  I have a tendency to fill too much (same goes when I make Asian wraps).  So, with that in mind, I put a thin (or what I thought was thin) layer of whipped cream and then added my layer of strawberries.  I tried to roll it up...and lo and behold, it was too much!  So, I unrolled my cake, took some filling out, and re-rolled.  And what happened??  I cracked my cake.  Boo.  I know.  It's what I get for messing around so much with it.   Ah, well, there's always a learning curve!  Overall though, this was a super easy endeavor.  I will just have to try again!  These were super moist with just the right amount of sweetness.  Delish!  Hope you enjoyed, dear readers!