After baking numerous batches of swiss rolls, I stumbled upon a new recipe by Chef Keiko Ishida and was intrigued. The pandan swiss roll recipe calls for cooking butter and flour to form a dough, a little like making cream puffs (choux)! I tried it out right away since I love pandan leaves and always have them on hands (but in a small jar as pandan paste though).
However, A is not a big fan of pandan, he is a pure chocolate lover and it led me to think of making a combination of the two. I jazzed up some of the most basic swiss roll with a huge bundle of cocoa powder for half the baking pan and the other half is the new pandan swiss roll recipe.
It came out as an absolute success! A and I literally can’t have enough of it. I made a batch three times bigger than our normal cake, and we have it at least three times a day for morning tea, for afternoon tea and midnight snack (gosh). The pandan taste is rather mild and elegant is greatly complimented by the dark rich flavor of dark chocolate part and it’s all lightened up by the freshness of blueberries in the whipped cream filling.
I love this so much that I decided to make another combination: chocolate and pink rose color (which initially I wanted to make into a cherry blossom theme, you know with the flowers patterned on the skin) I was thinking of making this for a few days before rolling my sleeves up and making it. I drew out my plan so that I won’t mess it up. Well, but then after baking, this is when reality hit me, the part I wanted to be soft pink turned light orange despite how much I mixed in the food coloring. I piped it out to make a nice flower pattern; after baking, all the piped patterns were gone. I was lazy to peel of the bottom skin so it was on here and there on the roll.
On the bright side, this time I did roll the cake a little tighter leaving it with a better shape.
Oh well, we still eat big gulps of it though.
