Biskuit¶
648 words on Recipes
Making Biskuit (sponge cake) always appeared to be a tricky thing to me. For two reasons I think. The first being that my grandma said it’s hard to do, the second being that I failed to get a good result when trying it many years ago - thus concluding that grandma was right.
Now the thing is that grandma isn’t always right. She just had preconceptions about things being hard. For example she used to say that making yeast dough is hard. Probably because that’s what she had been taught. Yet, of all the yeast doughs we (or more realistically: she) made, exactly none came out bad. And every single time she was delighted at how well it came out. Not being the cheerful type I simply concluded that making yeast dough isn’t hard, which in turn made it an easy but still time consuming thing to do.
And coming to think about it the thing that (spectacularly) failed at my earlier attempt of making a Biskuit was that I made a Biskuitrolle for which you bake a flat bit of the cake, spread jam on it and then roll it up. And the main problem was the rolling up. Instead of nicely rolling up, my cake mostly broke. Leaving me with a mess of tasty but broken cake that had jam all over it.
When my colleague recently brought a nice Bisquitrolle with him, I immediately had to ask what the trick was. The first trick was that his grandma made it, and the second was that you need to roll up the dough while it’s still hot. You place a towel on it, so it doesn’t stick together and then you roll it up until it’s cooled off. Once it’s cool you can put the jam or creamy filling on it - without fully unrolling it and then you can roll it up again just fine. Both easy and - as I learned - working rather well.
I also found a very simple recipe in an old cookbook for making the dough which worked suprisingly well. (Surprisingly
because there were a variety of recipes and this was the most simple one with the advantage that I actually had all the ingredients around.) It requires:
- 3 eggs
- 3 tablespoons of cold water
- 150g sugar
- 1 pack of vanilla sugar
- 60g flour
- 60g starch
- 1 teaspoon of baking powder
You add the water to the eggs and give them a good beating until they become a thickish cream. Somehow the water seems to really improve the behaviour of the eggs here. Then you add the sugars to the cream and beat them in as well.
Finally you sift the flour, starch and baking powder onto the cream and carefully drag them into it. I assume that using the mixer for this step would destroy the creaminess a litte. From my experience I can also say that you may just get away with using 120g of flour if you don’t have any starch at hand.
The result of this is put on a rectangular baking tin covered with baking parchment (tin foil seems to work as well) and baked for 13 minutes at 220°C. After baking you immediately remove it and carefully peel off the parchment/foil. Then you put a towel on top and roll up the cake with the towel inside.
After it has cooled you unroll it as much as you can, remove the towel, put in some jam or other substances and roll it up again. I used mum-made raspberry-redcurrant jam and some almond slices, if you must know. As the ends will look a bit rough and uneven, you cut them off to give the nice look you probably wanted. This has the excellent side effect that you now have a very good excuse for eating the pieces you just cut off. Hmmm.
