A Roll by Any Other Name Would Taste as Good

The French called it "La Roulade", the Americans "Jelly Roll" and the English "Swiss Roll". Locally, it is often referred to as the "sugar roll"; a snack made popular by Polar Puffs. It is essentially a sponge cake baked in a square or rectangular tin, then rolled around its filling of whipped cream or ganache.

Tiger Roll

For our third baking lesson at Creative Culinare, we learned to bake a basic roll and the "famous" tiger roll. As with sponge cakes, oil is used in place of butter, thus making the sponge cake light as air.

Baking the basic roll was quite straight forward. In fact, it is one of easiest cakes to bake. To decorate the roll, we can either make a rainbow roll (roll with 3 colours) or a feather roll. As we do not like to add colouring to our food, we opted for the feather roll instead. We were taught how to make the feather pattern on the roll using a satay stick. Our feather roll turned out very well and earned a lot of compliments from Chef Judy. Most of our classmates prefer to go for the rainbow roll instead.

The tiger roll actually consists of 2 parts - the "tiger skin" and the roll, each baked separately, then rolled together. We were told that this was an "accidental" creation by a Malaysian pastry chef. In this recipe, it takes 10 eggs to make the "tiger skin" and 5 for the basic roll. Hence, while it is a beautiful combination, being cholestrol-conscious, we resolved to do without the "tiger skin" in future.

The gods must be smiling on us today. Our rolls didn't crack -- this seems to be a common problem among comments posted on various blogs. To avoid the cracking, the common advice posted is to roll it immediately when it is out of the oven over a slightly wet towel. We did none of this and yet our rolls are soft and easy to roll. Kudos to Chef Judy's recipes!

Feather Roll

Hmm...now, we won't need to fret what to give friends for Christmas :) We will bake them swiss rolls with different types of fillings. Choc chips for the choc lover, maybe one with fresh strawberries or mangos for the fruit lover. The list goes on ...

More Pictures

Creative Culinaire Swiss Roll Lesson

As Light As Air

In our second lesson at Creative Culinaire, we learned how to bake chiffon cake — a cake that was described as “as light as air” by its creator, Henry Baker. Henry had created this recipe in the 1920s and then sold it to General Mills. The lightness of the cake comes from using beaten egg whites and oil instead of butter.

We were determined not to repeat the same disaster as our first lesson (read our blog “The Art of Mixing & Folding”). For our first cake, the Orange Chiffon Cake, we cleaned all the equipment and make sure that there is no hint of egg yolk in our egg whites mixture. All went well and our instructor, Chef Judy Koh, was quite impressed with the result. We even earned her compliment “This cake is good”.

However, our second cake, Walnut Chiffon Cake, did not go so well. Perhaps we had not cleaned the egg separator and our egg whites did not stiffen at all. It was a terrible feeling. My heart sank just looking at the mixture and willing it to rise, but fully knowing that it wouldn’t. At that point, we had to make a decision whether to go ahead or start all over. We decided to re-do our egg whites even though it may mean we do not have enough time to bake our third cake. It was well worth it. Although we over-beat the egg whites in our anxiety and the cake did not turn as as fluffy as some of our classmates’, it tasted delicious and we were happy with the way it turned out. It wasn’t FLAT :)

Somehow, we managed to find time to bake our third cake, the Pandan Chiffon Cake. It was the best of all the 3 chiffon cakes we baked that day. It was very fluffy and light. Everyone loved it and a friend even complimented that “it’s as good as that sold at Bengawan Solo”

As Judy mentioned at the start of the class, ” the difficulty in creating the perfect meringue will come back to haunt you”. It certainly did. However, knowing that it is not an unachievable task, as exemplified by our Pandan Chiffon Cake, serves to only spur us to perfect this elusive and exacting task.


The pandan in foreground, Orange Chiffon Cake on the right and Walnut Chiffon on the left