Invite friends over for dinner of course! We're forever going to Katy and Mike's house, where they cook us fantastic food and keep us entertained with their awesome toddler Lucas and sparkling conversation! It was high time we returned the favour.
After baby-proofing the flat, Olly and I cooked an utterly delicious roast chicken, complete with home-made stuffing, roasted sweet potatoes, parsnips and potatoes and broccoli cauliflower cheese gratin. We ate while listening to a Herb Albert and The Tijuana Brass vinyl Olly and I picked up at a charity shop.
It was equal parts hilarious and awesome, kind of like eating dinner in an elevator. Imagine having serious conversation with Spanish Flea in the background. You can't, can you?
I recently found the ridiculously inspiring Sprinkle Bakes blog and it is becoming a firm favourite with me! I wish that my life was coloured by her baked goods, a weird thing to say to most but once you see the things that Heather has baked you will want to be surrounded by them.
I was particularly taken by the Pink Velvet Roulade, because it looks incredible. The video alone makes me want to cry with envy. So being insanely adventurous I decide to make one for us to have as dessert.
Mine isn't quite picture perfect.
I think several factors attributed to mine becoming an aesthetically displeasing wreck.
I have never made a roulade before, apart from one made of meat and those tend to be pretty forgiving. I feel that I may have rolled it a little bit too tight or potentially over cooked it as it wasn't quite as springy as in the video. It ended up cracking into to pieces, hence the insane 'plaster job'
I didn't use enough food colouring. I couldn't find my Wilton Food Colouring so bought some Dr. Oetker High Concentration Gel. Not my favourite, it took forever to get to this peachy colour and didn't intensify like Wilton's would have. I think my failure should be renamed the "Kinda Peachy Velvet Roulade".
It was a very long time between the cooling of the cake and the filling of the cake. At least six hours. We have a tiny tiny kitchen so trying to cook a roast is generally an extreme issue of timing and organisation. The kitchen also has no window so it is very hard to cool when the oven has been on pretty much all day. The buttercream filling was so very soft and I feel that it could have benefited from a little time in the fridge.
Despite all this, I feel that Katy and I made the roulade quite literally awesome. And it tasted lovely! I'm definitely going to try again, fully aware of my previous mistakes and hopefully make one as perfect as it should be.
I had also made a batch of lemon cupcakes in the event that the roulade was a bit of a flop. Self-fulfilling prophecy perhaps?
Kinda Peachy Velvet Roulade has a ring to it, however! :)
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