A festive cake: chocolate rulltårta

This Christmas my parents wanted me to bake a light and "easy" cake for our Swedish Christmas dinner so we thought of a chocolate filled rulltårta. Rulltårta, or roll cake in Swedish, is known in the US as Swiss roll, while we do not have such a cake in Switzerland. Maybe another Swiss-Swedish confusion :-p

So rulltårta is basically a very thin sponge cake filled with either (whipped) cream and berries or with chocolate cream. Here I went for chocolate cream. It was a totally new experiment and turned out to be a great dessert, for Christmas or any time of the year with coffee in the afternoon.

The recipe is short and the chocolate filling easy to make. The only tricky part is 1) making sure the cake does not overbake, else it will crack when rolled, and 2) flipping the cake upside down on parchment paper, but if you don't hesitate it will be fine ! So try it and enjoy :-D

Recipe for a chocolate filled rulltårta:

Sponge cake:

3 eggs
2 dl sugar
2 dl flour
2 tsp baking powder
0.5 dl milk

Beat sugar and eggs until white. Mix flour and baking powder, then carefully add it to the batter and mix. Add milk last and mix gently. Pour the batter on a sheet pan covered with parchment paper (it's the flat pan that you have in your oven). Bake 4.5-5 min at 250 C. Spread sugar on the cake and flip it upside down on parchment paper covered with sugar. Detach the parchment paper very carefully so as not to break the cake: you can spread some water on the paper, it will help the cake detach from it.

Chocolate filling:

2.25 dl light cream (15% fat)
3 eggyolks
3 tbsp sugar
3-4 tbsp cocoa
2.25 tbsp maizena
23 g butter

In a saucepan, mix all ingredients (minus the butter) and warm up while whisking until the sauce thickens into a cream. Add butter and beat up the cream. Spread the chocolate cream on the cooled cake and roll the cake up on the long side. Cut 2-3cm thick slices and enjoy the cake with coffee or as dessert!

Chestnut cake with chocolate icing

This week was a colleague's 30th birthday (happy birthday Alex!) so I thought I should bake a cake for him. But also because it had been a while since I had brought a cake to work and my colleagues were wondering whether and when I would bring a sweet next. So voilà here is the first cake of 2014: a chestnut cake covered with insane chocolate icing!

I love both chestnuts and chocolate and I think they go really well together (in crêpes too, you should try :-D ). Moreover, grocery shops were closed when I embarked on this new recipe but I remembered I had a pack of chestnut purée somewhere in my freezer that I had planned on using a few months back. The recipe is very straightforward, easy and quick to prepare. I recommend baking the cake in the morning or the night before because of the chocolate icing, but you can also have the cake without icing, the chestnut taste will come out even more. As note, the chocolate icing described below can be used on any cake or dessert, it melts in your mouth (alternatively you can also eat it on its own... mmm).

Ok I let you try it and let me know what you think! Enjoy !!!

Recipe for a 28-30 cm long cake:

200 g butter, room T
200 g sugar
4 eggyolks
4 eggwhites
250 g chestnut purée
150 g ground almonds
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp baking powder

Beat up the soft butter, add eggyolks and sugar and continue beating. Add chestnut purée, ground almonds and flour, mix. Beat up eggwhites in a separate bowl and incorporate them gently into the mix. Transfer to a buttered and floured cake form and draw a line in the length of the batter. Bake 50-55 min at 200C in the middle of the oven.

Chocolate icing

100 g dark cooking chocolate
85 g cream

15 g butter

1 tbsp powder sugar

Melt all the ingredients in a bain marie while gently mixing (alternatively warm up a sauce pan, add the ingredients and gently mix away from the fire, you don't want the chocolate to cook!). Cover the cooled cake with chocolate sauce and let the icing dry for a few hours (or minutes :-p ) before serving.