A year with the Daring Bakers - cool!

Hello Daring Bakers!

I really put this month’s challenge off until the last minute and almost didn’t bother. Then I realised that this post would mark my one-year anniversary as part of the group! How could I let that pass?

So, even though I’m not a great ice-cream eater, and even though it was so cold I contemplated making a warm custard filling instead, I’m glad I went ahead and made this month’s Swiss swirl ice-cream cake.

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food.  Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

We needed to make Swiss rolls, a filling for them, two ice creams and a fudge sauce, from scratch. However, Sunita gave us a lot of leeway with the recipe, allowing us to vary the flavours of each component.

We were also required to set the dessert in a bowl or utensil of our choice in the order given in the recipe-Swiss roll, first ice-cream, the fudge topping and, finally, the second ice cream.

I made the Swiss roll from the challenge recipe, with two changes. I omitted the hot water (unintentionally, bad recipe reading skills) and rolled the cakes in baking paper instead of a tea towel (intentionally, to save from washing extra tea towels).

While I’ve made Swiss rolls before, I definitely need more practise because I managed to produce one or two cracks. Luckily, they cracked on the inside and looked okay once completely rolled up.

I’d run out of cream by the time I was ready to make the Swiss roll filling, and it was close to midnight, so I made a simple vanilla buttercream instead (the eggless kind, very similar to this icing). It turned out to be less than ideal, I’d refrigerated the Swiss rolls to make cutting easier but the buttercream set hard, which meant I had to use more pressure and ended up tearing and squishing the cake quite a bit. Oops. Next time, I’ll buy more cream.

As for ice cream, I turned to Mr. Lebovitz for help. I made a caramel ice cream (minus the salt), where I learnt to take my sugar to the dark side. Although I think I took it too far and ended up with a slightly bitter confection.

The other flavour was an eggless peanut butter ice-cream which I found here (the recipe is from David Lebovitz too). So far, I’ve made three successful ice creams based on his recipes, so it looks like The Perfect Scoop is going to find a space on my bookshelf very soon. I think I may even be getting a little bit more excited about ice cream now!

Caramel ice cream (left) and Peanut butter ice cream (right)

And because I’m a bit of a peanut butter fiend, I swooned a little when I found this Nigella recipe. Spoon  rating = 5 licks!

Finally, I had all the components ready, so I made a Swiss roll ice-cream sandwich cake in this order: Swiss roll, caramel ice-cream, peanut butter chocolate fudge sauce, peanut butter ice-cream, then topped with another layer of the Swiss roll.

And I cannot think of a better way to mark a fantastic year with my fellow Daring Bakers ☺

Thank you Lis and Ivonne for creating such a fun “family”. Thank you to the Daring Bakers for your friendship and support. Hip, hip hooray (x3) to the lot of you!

Cake for all my friends