I think I am getting addicted to baking and taking food photos. I keep telling myself to do more rational/sane things like reading news and keeping up with current affairs etc (ha!) but the force is too strong and my weak will keeps succumbing to the growing baking addiction. My stash of new recipe books and ongoing discovery of wonderful food blogs fuels the addiction.... aargh.

And so I baked myself a swiss roll (since I had leftover but unexpired mascarpone cheese fr my carrot cake) on Fri, one day after getting home from Bintan. The original recipe was for a banana mascarpone roll - but cos I had recently gotten a bottle of Valrhona cocoa powder, I was quite excited to try it out to see if this supposedly premium powder produces significantly yummier choc cake (conclusion: I think it does as my choc sponge cake was infused with quite a rich and nice chocolatey flavour) I also chanced upon some fresh strawberries from the neighbourhood NTUC on Fri morning - so I decided to turn the recipe into a chocolate mascarpone roll with banana/ strawberry bits :)

The roll cake turned out OK, but 'cos I'm still relatively inexperienced in making roll cakes the last 1/5 or so of the cake base decided to dislocate itself while I was rolling it... So I decided to turn the broken strip of cake into pieces of deconstructed choc cake with strawberry topping instead heh. Though this swiss roll didn't turn out as pretty as my green tea one, it still tasted not bad lah :) Quite like making swiss rolls (though I'd need to improve) cos of the many improvisations u can play with (eg. you can easily vary the filling, change the size of the roll, use the cake base for other random cake creations etc)

 

my deconstructed chocolate swiss roll :)

 

 generous filling which D thinks looks like pizza topping (?!). The delicious mascarpone cream however was a bit too fluid and oozy :(

 and guess you can tell what happened to all the cream... this was not a very successfully assembled swiss roll due to the cream leakage, but oh well, healthier with less cream lah :)

On a separate note - an ex-HDB colleague actually asked if he could order a carrot cake from me after seeing my FB photos! None of my baked goods are for sale really but I decided to take up the challenge and will be working hard to make sure my first customer is a satisfied one :)