Week 5: Roulade and spiced biscuits

I tried to make a roulade. I really did. But it didn't turn out quite the way I expected it. The spiced biscuits were nice though.

I know, I know. I neglected you last week. I was supposed to post a blog, but I didn't have time and I ended up failing to even put pen to paper. I have failed my audience, and for that I can only apologise.

Don't worry though. I have QUITE THE TALE of baking failure for you to wrap your head around.

As it turns out, last week was a good time to neglect the blog, because if i hadn't then this week's entry would have been fairly boring. I made Kim-Joy's spiced biscuits at the weekend, and I was anticipating disaster so I decided not to make them into a chandelier like she did on the show. Unfortunately, I set the bar too low for myself.

The biscuits went off without a hitch. I'd say they were my biggest success this year, even better than the naan (although not catching fire helped them a little). The bake went well, my vegan substitutions worked perfectly and the end result tasted fantastic. I used banana instead of eggs, and not only did it bind everything together just as well as the non-vegan option, it added a subtle fruity flavour that melded amazingly with the spices.

Successful biscuits.

I'm going to post the recipe at the bottom, because I am very much a fan of the biscuits I made and you should all try them. But I know you're not really here to celebrate my successes, so I'm going to stop talking about them. Instead, I'm going to tell a tale so horrific that those of a nervous disposition should leave now while they have the chance. I'm going to write about my attempt at (crash of thunder, wolf howling in the distance) A ROULADE.

Kim-Joy's roulade

Sometimes in life, you look at a project, sit back, sigh and say to yourself: “No matter what I try, I really am completely fucked”. That's how I felt at the start of this bake. I honestly didn't see how I'd come out of this with my dignity intact, but at the same time I could never have predicted how badly everything would go.

First of all, I should address why I didn't make a blancmange. Now, I know this might be a controversial statement given the current political climate, but I actually don't want to drag the country back to the 1970s. I don't care how much Paul would have totally eaten blancmange at school if it had tasted like Prue's, it's still a shit dessert for people who cross the street if they see someone who might speak foreign at them. Also, its three main ingredients are eggs, cream and gelatine, so by making it vegan I'd basically be creating something completely different. I decided to stay in the 21st century and make a roulade instead.

Now, I said at the start of this little challenge that I had a veto if I didn’t want to do the technical challenge for whatever reason, but that I would attempt to use Kim-Joy’s recipes wherever possible because I know her in actual real life (she’s somehow even lovelier than she seems on the show). I was debating whether or not to get in touch with her and ask for her roulade recipe, but I decided against it. It would be more fun, I decided, if I tried to piece together the recipe for myself.

This is what is known as “pretending to be a real baker”. I don’t recommend it.

On the show, Kim-Joy made a roulade with passion fruit curd, whipped cream and raspberries inside it, all decorated with some kind of yummy biscuits. I did some research, and found enough info that I would be able to give it a go. This started out very well, as I began making a vegan passion fruit curd that actually worked! It tasted nice, the recipe was easy to follow, nothing caught fire; I was onto a winner.

The first problem I encountered was the meringue. Once again, veganism caused me problems, as I had to swap out the egg white for that old favourite: chickpea water. I whipped it up with a load of sugar, and it tasted fine - insofar as it tasted of a shitload of whipped sugar - so I poured it onto a tray and shoved it in the oven. After baking it for the required amount of time, I tested the surface to see if it was firm enough.

You would think that this would be a fairly simple process. Touch the surface, press gently, if it feels solid then it’s firm, if not then put it back in the oven. How could I fuck that up? HOW INDEED.

I thought I had a solid meringue. I was sure. It felt firm. Yet by some miraculous quirk of science, when I turned it over onto a wire rack to cool the whole thing… splurged? It wasn’t quite liquid, but it was VERY DEFINITELY NOT A SOLID, and it was rapidly turning into sugary ooze.

I reacted quickly, flipping the whole thing back over, scraping it into the baking tray and hastily smoothing the whole thing with my fingers, squelching bits of half-cooked meringue into the holes that had formed in my perfect sheet. It was like I was assembling the stickiest jigsaw puzzle ever seen outside of a rehabilitation facility for chronic masturbators. As I soon found out, it was the kind of stickiness that didn’t easily wash off. It was also in my eyebrows. I don’t know how.

A FLAWLESS SHEET OF MERINGUE

So the meringue was a disaster area. No worries; the passion fruit curd was fine, so I was a solid 50-50 in terms of success. I made up a vegan shortbread biscuit dough quickly while I waited for the slimy mess in my oven to finish cooking, then I took the meringue out to cool. I wasn’t going to risk the wire rack this time, so I left it in the tray to cool and moved onto the next part of the recipe: whipped cream.

There was no way I was going to cock this up. Whipped cream is whipped cream. Admittedly mine was vegan, meaning it was soy-based cream substitute rather than the real thing, but that should be fine, right? I got my whisk - actually two whisks taped together, apparently that helps aerate the cream quicker - and went at it.

A few minutes passed. My arm was starting to hurt. The cream was still just cream. No worries. I just needed to keep going. It would whip.

Five minutes passed. I was sweating now. I had switched arms twice. Still no sign of a whip. A smart person would give up at this point.

Ten minutes passed. The veins on both my arms were bulging. I could no longer see straight. The rythmic clicking of whisks on a pyrex bowl was the only sound I knew. The cream was still just cream. It would always be cream. Whipped cream is nothing but a madman’s dream, the ambitious ramblings of a failed prophet. And yet still we whip. We must whip.

Ahem.

I turned to Google at this stage. FUN KITCHEN FACT: single cream doesn’t whip, ever, because its fat content isn’t high enough. LESS FUN KITCHEN FACT: my soya substitute was the vegan equivalent of single cream.

IT’S FINE. NO PROBLEM. IF IT NEEDS MORE FAT, I GUESS I’LL HAVE TO PUT MORE FUCKING FAT IN IT WON’T I.

I’m not proud of this next bit. With the urgency of someone rapidly losing their grip on sanity, I shoved the decidedly un-whipped cream in a blender - pausing only to put my biscuits in the oven, as they’d need to cool before I used them - and added coconut oil. If you’ve never used coconut oil, then please keep it that way. It’s basically vegan lard with a much flakier texture, and it tastes like tropical heart failure. But it was my only option.

I must have looked like something out of a Hammer Horror movie as I leered at my blender, praying the mix of coconut oil and vegan cream would turn into something whippable. I was bent over, wild-eyed, meringue in my beard, bright orange passion fruit curd stains down my apron, face bright red and veins popping out everywhere from a mixture of effort and stress. At last my cream and oil mixed to an extent that I was happy with. I put it back into a bowl, and began to whip.

IT. WOULDN’T. FUCKING. WHIP.

Never mind. Back to the blender. More fat. All it needs is more fat, which is fine, because I have coconut oil and coconut oil is fat and all it needs is more fat, right, so I’ll put some coconut oil in and then I’ll blend it and whizzzzzz, look at it blend, and I can’t fail at this, because it’s just whipped cream and what cook can’t whip cream, that’s the most basic thing there is, so I’ll just take it out of the blender and get a whisk to it and OH GOD WHY WON’T IT WHIP.

I sank to the floor, defeated. I had failed. All I’d managed to do is add a bunch of saturated fat to cream. This was not my finest hour. There was only one thing left to do; assemble my roulade. The individual components might not be the best, but it would all come together to make one tasty whole. Don’t read that last part out loud.

I spread passion fruit curd on my meringue, forming a crude wall around the edges so my un-whipped cream wouldn’t fall out straight away. I plopped raspberries down on top of the whole thing, and started to roll it up. I was gentle at first, but then realised I needed to be a bit firmer if I wanted to get that tight spiral, and then I realised it didn’t matter what I did because the whole thing had collapsed.

Stop judging me. This is a place free from judgement.

The meringue just wasn’t firm enough. It was nothing like a roulade, it was just a big, sweet heap. But it gave me an idea; I could still salvage this. I hadn’t wasted this time after all. I’d make it into an Eton mess. That’s just meringue bits in cream and fruit, which is basically what I’d made after… wow, two hours. This was the first good idea I’d had throughout this whole disaster.

SPOILER ALERT: It was not a good idea

Or at least, that’s what I would have thought if it had worked. The meringue was, unfortunately, not firm enough. It basically dissolved in the cream and curd, leaving a bowl of what looked very much like sick.

This was what I had spent all this time on. All this effort. I had tried so hard, and failed at every step on the way, and now all I had to show for it was a pile of sugary slop. Oh, and a vague feeling like I’d forgotten something. And a faint smell of burning. Was I having a stroke? What could possibly be burning OH NO MY BISCUITS.

They're actually worse than they look

What did it taste like?

To be fair, it wasn’t awful. It was basically just a sweet, fruity pudding. But the texture was quite vomit-like, and you could really feel the saturated fat clogging up your arteries. I gave some to my friend, and she started to cry. That about sums it up.

Was it really that bad?

My cats turned it down. My cats eat bugs and lick each other’s bumholes.

Was it worthy of a Hollywood handshake?

Based on how he’s been giving them out this season, probably.

But the spiced biscuits were nice?

SO GOOD. Here’s the recipe, please try it because they were delicious and easy.

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Recipe

For the biscuits:

• 180g vegan butter 

• 150g dark muscovado sugar

• pinch of salt

• 75g golden syrup

• 450g plain flour

• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

• 4 tsp green cardamom pods, husks removed and seeds ground; or 2 tsp ground cardamom  

• 2 tsp ground cinnamon

• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

• 1/4 tsp ground cloves

• 1/2 a ripe banana

• 1 tbsp soy milk

• 20-25 boiled sweets

You will also need:  

Round biscuit cutter and smaller star biscuit cutter

2 baking sheets lined with baking paper 

Step 1 – Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/350°F/Gas 4.

Step 2 – Make the biscuits. Place the vegan butter, sugar and salt into a bowl and beat with an electric whisk for about 3 minutes, until light and creamy. Add the golden syrup and mix again until smooth, then stir in the plain flour, bicarbonate of soda and ground spices. Mash the banana with the soy milk and mix into the dough until it all comes together and is soft, but not sticky. 

Step 3 – Tip out the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Roll it out until about 6–7mm thick and stamp out as many circles as you can. Stamp stars out of the middle of the circles, then reroll all the leftover dough and repeat.

Step 4 – Place the biscuits on the prepared baking sheets. Add the boiled sweets into the star-shaped holes; they will melt and spread out to fill the space.

Step 5 – Bake the biscuits for 10 minutes, until they are just turning brown at the edges and the sweets have melted. Remove from the oven and allow to cool a little until the windows have set, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.