Great British Bake Off Week One - Swiss Roll

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Hoorah, the Great British Bake Off finally made it's long-awaited return to our screens this week. With plenty of yummy bakes, eyebrow-raising innuendos and hilarious Mel and Sue one-liners, it did not disappoint! To celebrate, each week I will be choosing one of their bakes to have my own go at, hopefully learning from the bakers' mistakes and trying out their techniques. This week, swiss rolls.

I found a recipe on the BBC Food website and couldn't believe how simple it seemed, surely it couldn't be that easy! Let's find out:

Ingredients

• 3 free range eggs
• 75g self raising flour
• 75g caster sugar
• raspberry jam
• a small pot of whipping cream
• a handful of raspberries
• icing sugar for dusting

Start by whisking the eggs and sugar in a bowl. I first mixed them together with a wooden spoon to make a smooth paste before whisking but I'm not sure if that made a huge difference. Then I used an electric whisk until it became light and frothy. After, I sifted then folded in the flour, being careful not to beat out all of the air my whisking helped create.

This is the point where I thought it would be great to try the pattern-making idea shown by a few of the bakers on this week's show. I put a bit of the mixture into a small bowl and then added some food colouring (pink in my case) and then after greasing and lining a shallow tray, used a spoon to make flower designs. The cake mixture was quite fluid so I would recommend adding more flour to this coloured mixture as mine started to run into each other. 

Now put the tray in the freezer, being careful that the tray stays flat whilst you carry it over as a few of my flower designs started to run at this point. I wasn't sure how long to freeze the pattern for so used preheating the oven (200°C) as a timer. Once the oven was ready I retrieved my tray from the freezer and noticed that my patterns were starting to melt quite quickly so I would recommend freezing your designs for longer, possibly 30 minutes. I panicked slightly at this point so poured all of my cake mixture into the tray to try to get it into the oven as quickly as possible. This then created more problems as I had to tilt the tray to get the mixture to cover it evenly, which in turn obviously smudging my flower designs too. So what you should actually do is spoon the mixture on to ensure that you get an even covering without having to tilt it. This should make sure that your designs do not distort.

Bake the cake for just over 7 minutes, it really doesn't take long as it's so thin so don't forget about it! Once baked, leave to cool slightly for a couple of minutes and then lift the cake and greaseproof paper onto a board. Now's another chance to try out the GBBO bakers' techniques. Whilst it's still warm, roll the cake still on the greaseproof paper and then use a rubber-band to secure it in place. Leave it in this shape until cool, I actually left mine overnight but you could leave yours for an hour if you wanted to eat it on the same day. 

Whilst waiting for it to cool, whip your cream using an electric whisk until it holds its shape and chop your raspberries ready to fill. Once cool, unroll your cake and spread with a layer of raspberry jam, then whipped cream and finally with chopped raspberries. As you can see, I made the mistake of filling mine too closely to the sides, which resulted in it oozing out of the front so be quite sparing with your toppings.

Once you have filled it, carefully roll the cake up to create your swiss roll, finishing with a sprinkling of icing sugar before serving.

So that's my attempt at a swiss roll. I'm not sure how it compares to the bakers' attempts on this week's Great British Bake Off, nor what Mary or Paul would make of it but it seemed to get a thumbs up from my family! Did you have a go at making a swiss roll this week too? Let me know how you got on and if you have any of your own tips for me.

Next week the bakers will be attempting biscuit-making to check back here to see what I've come up with...