Today’s recipe is Mary Berry’s chocolate roulade. Going into this I was thinking the fuss they made about rolling being difficult was similar to the fuss made about raising agents on the show. Like, using raising agents is not really a down fall I see frequently in the baking world and on the show they make it into some sort of catastrophic trap. So maybe rolling up a roulade is just being blown out of proportion and isn’t actually that difficult!

Well…. I mean, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with making the cake. I loved that there were so few ingredients. You really just need a whole bunch of eggs.

175g dark chocolate
6 large eggs – room tempurature
175g sugar
2 tbsp cocoa powder
300ml heavy cream, 2 tsp of instant vanilla pudding mix added during whipping to stabilize
powdered sugar for dusting

First up I melted the chocolate

Then I separated the eggs. I know there’s a tendency to ignore things like “room temperature”, but for this it’s really important because otherwise the egg whites won’t whip up. I just put them in a bowl of water for a bit to warm them up if I forget to take them out of the fridge early

So then you take those room temperature egg whites in a room temperature bowl and you whip those up until you can hold the bowl upside down

Then the egg yolks get whipped up nice and big and everything gets folded together and spread out on a sheet pan and baked.

Then its cool and is flipped out

Then cover it with whipped cream

And then you roll it. Or you try. If you look at the featured image it totally looks like everything went great right?

Well then I tried to move it off the cling wrap and it just… well look

It fell apart to the slightest movement. The only thing I could think is I baked it too long? And used too much whipped cream?

I mean it was delicious so at least there was that. And it was easy to make so I decided to make it again and try baking it for a shorter time and using less whipped cream

and it went better? Not great. I think it was slightly under baked. Who knows. This one at least held up to being moved and cut. So basically I give myself an F- on this. Bottom of the technical. Last place.But at least it was tasty!

What was difficult:

• The rolling!! I have no idea if I baked it wrong or it needed to set longer or what went wrong! Poor cake

What I learned:

• Rolling is harder than it looks
• Don’t make fun of people on bake off for messing up the roll
• You can add instant pudding mix to whipped cream to stabilize it so you can eat it days later

Would I make this again?

• Yeah! It’s tasty and i”m pretty determined to make it correctly so I’ll be making this in the future. Hopefully I can do a GBBO 2.0 recipes revisited and see if I can actually complete some of my oops-es