We made our first ever Swiss Roll! (with home-made gooseberry and passionfruit filling)

We've had the baking bug long before this years GBBO started as Miss T asked to do cooking pretty much every day! But we've never cooked Swiss Roll before so that was inspired by last Wednesday's Bake Off. 

I came across this recipe at Waitrose and decided to amend it to use up some sweet gooseberries I had in the fridge. 

I made a kind of gooseberry and passionfruit jam / puree for the filling. Here's the recipe for that part.

Ingredients: (just for the filling, for the main recipe for the sponge, see here)

250g punnet sweet gooseberries (they are a reddish colour rather than the usual greenish colour of gooseberries)

2-3 tbsp caster sugar

dash of madeira

a little water

1 passionfruit

Method:

1. Cut the goosberries in half and place in a pan on the hob with a little water and the caster sugar and bring to the boil. Then reduce the heat and simmer until it reduces and thickens. Add a tiny dash of madeira.

2. Towards the end of cooking, add in the flesh of 1 passionfruit by cutting in half and scooping out the flesh including the seeds. 

3. Then push through a seive to remove all the seeds. I added a little shopbought raspberry coulis to it to make sure I had enough to cover the sponge. 

Whilst your puree is cooking you can prepare the swiss roll. 

It is actually a lot more straight forward than I imagined. I followed the Waitrose recipe using 3 beaten eggs whisked with 100g caster sugar for about 8 minutes. Then folded in the flour. I used a metal spoon as suggested but just read somewhere today that using a whisk to very gently fold in might be better so I'll try that out next time. 

It was baked in the oven at 200C in a lined tin. I did it for a strict 10 minutes which worked out perfectly in my oven. 

I remembered to turn it out whilst warm and roll in a fresh piece of baking paper - but initially I forgot to dust the baking paper with icing sugar so I quickly removed it, added icing sugar to the other side of the baking paper and tried again because in those few seconds it had started to stick to the paper - whoops!

It rolled really well and when it was cool, I unrolled it and added my gooseberry and passionfruit jam/puree and re-rolled. 

The whole family was impressed that it had turned out so well for my first attempt! 

Miss T of course had to get involved too and she insisted on wiping the surfaces which is also an important job to learn in the kitchen so I had no objections.