Just the name of this cookery book intrigued me. When I
flipped through the pages the inside had me somewhat puzzled and intrigued even
more. There are groups of full colour pages, some of them half pages, and
there’s actually a couple of fold out pages. This is not like the usual cookery
book.
It’s really handsomely produced with its hard covers,
intricately designed inside, double ribbon markers and arty photographic pages.
It caught me in. I had to have it. Which also meant I had to cook from it. But will
the recipes turn out as good as the layout?
Once I had worked out the complicated layout, which I much
appreciated, I was ready to choose something to cook. There were left over egg
whites in the fridge so I decided on the strawberry and passionfruit roulade—though
I was somewhat uncertain about attempting it.
Actually it was not that difficult—even though mine went
terribly astray somewhere along the way.
A lamington tin had to be prepared with backing paper, greased and
sprinkled with caster sugar.
The cake itself was basically only a meringue and this is
where mine started to go wrong. The egg whites did not seem to want to beat up
totally. They went most of the way but didn’t fully fluff. Anyway I went ahead
and cooked it.
The most difficult part was rolling it out onto the plate
once you had put strawberries and cream on it. And, somehow, carefully
following the clear instructions about how to fold back the paper and how to
lift the cake off, it turned into a roulade-looking dessert.
While it looked reasonably good it wasn’t that good to eat.
Something had gone wrong with the meringue mix and there was a layer of
jelly-like egg white that was not at all pleasant. After a few tries we had to
abandon the dessert. Pity. It looked better than it ended up tasting. My fault
I’m sure, not the recipe’s.
Taste: ✔✔
Ease of
cooking: ✔✔✔
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