'The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.'
Oscar Wilde
In food as in life, simplicity ought to be the ultimate goal of our endeavours. I'm reminded, however, of Oscar Wilde's timeless aphorism - simple things are only simple superficially. In cooking, for instance, the simplest dishes require the most painstaking precision since every tiny step is going to have profound repercussions for the finished dish.
Take the humble Swiss roll, for instance. The cake we associate with childhood. At its most basic, it's just a sponge sheet rolled up with a whipped cream filling. With only two ingredients, it's more prone to failure than a fancy dressed up layer cake. The sponge sheet has to be feathery light, moist but not gummy, and God forbid if it cracks when you roll it! No matter how many times I make it, there's always a sense of trepidation every time I make a new one.
Swiss rolls have become really popular in the past few years in Japan and Hong Kong, and you see fancy renditions involving coloured sponges and you-name-it flavours and fillings. The ones you get from good bakeries are actually very pricey, and although I'm tempted by the look of the fancy Swiss rolls every time, I could never bring myself to actually buy one!
The Swiss roll is one of the pastries where I think the original flavour is best. I get tempted by all the exciting flavours - purple potatoes, charcoal, etc. - but there's something very tempting about the pure flavours of eggs and cream. I've experimented with all sorts of sponges for the body of the roll - génoise and chiffon mainly. While chiffon sheets are wondrously soft and moist, it lacks the evenness of texture that I crave. On the other hand, génoises can easily be dry. This can be remedied by adding melted butter to the egg foam, but it's quite a finicky process and it can deflate the batter if you're not adept at it. Some American recipes suggest adding water to the egg foam to make it moist, but I find that it makes the finished sponge rather coarse in texture.
Here's my secret ingredient: whipped cream! Not only is it a dream to fold in, it also adds a creamy flavour to the sponge that complements beautifully with the cream filling. I first got the idea of using whipped cream for a génoise from Flo Braker's brown sugar génoise recipe, but I don't think she used it as a sponge sheet. Once I tried incorporating whipped cream into my génoise, there's no looking back.
Check out my cocoa Swiss roll on more pictures of rolling a cake!
