Chocolate Fudge Swiss Roll

Week 6 in the Cookbook Challenge and I’m quite late in posting this review! I’ve been on holidays for the past 2 weeks. The theme for week 6 was ‘Christmas’…Christmas seems like such a long time ago…

I decided to attempt a Chocolate Fudge Swiss Roll from one of my favourite cake cookbooks, Gorgeous Cakes, with a slight adaptation when the roll didn’t quite look like the picture…

Ingredients for the sponge:

50g cocoa powder

Pinch of sea salt

3 large eggs

75g light muscovado sugar (I just used caster sugar)

Icing sugar

Ingredients for the filling:

100g dark chocolate broken into pieces

1 tablespoon dark muscovado sugar (I just used dark brown sugar)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

200ml whipping cream

Chocolate curls (optional)

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees. Butter a 23cm x 32cm baking tin, line with baking paper and butter the paper too. Sift the cocoa into a bowl and add the salt. Place the eggs and sugar into a bowl and whisk for 8-10 minutes with an electric whisk until the mixture is pale and mousse like. Lightly fold the cocoa in two goes. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth the surface. Give the tin a couple of sharp taps to eliminate any large bubbles and bake for 8-10 minutes until set and springy to the touch.

Lay out a clean tea towel and sift over a fine layer of icing sugar. Turn the cake out onto it and carefully roll it up with the tea towel leaving the paper in place, starting at the short end. Leave this to cool for 40-60 minutes.

For the filling, melt the chocolate with the sugar, vanilla and 2 teaspoons of cream in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water, stirring until smooth, then set the bowl aside to cool. Whisk the remaining cream until it is stiff and fold in the cooled, melted chocolate.

Carefully unroll the sponge and peel off the baking paper. Spread with the chocolate cream, then roll the sponge up again and tip it into a long serving plate, seam downwards. Dust with icing sugar, and decorate with chocolate curls if you like. Chill, uncovered for 2 hours. Dust with icing sugar and chocolate curls to serve.

As you can see, mine wasn’t quite as pretty as the picture and had a few cracks appear when I rolled it back up with the filling. So I ended up covering the whole thing in the leftover filling to make just that little bit more decadent