Baking With Jake and Kaycie

What better way to spend a cold snowy afternoon than by baking with Jake and Kaycie. They came down to my house and we made the Mocha Roulade from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook Page 187.......well, that's what we started out making.
We baked the cake, rolled it up in a cocoa dusted towel and let it cool while we started making the chocolate mousse for the center of the cake.

Let's just say it now, we really struggled with this baking project. I thought it would be so easy. We made the Blackberry Roulade last year and it was so easy to make.

The trouble really started with the chocolate mousse. We were supposed to bring water, corn syrup and sugar to a boil then heat to 238 degrees. I don't have the greatest candy thermometer and the sugar mixture got way too hot so when we poured the mixture in with the egg yokes well you can imagine what happened......hard, crackling candy in the egg yokes..... yummy. Ok, not to worry we will just make a mocha flavored whipped cream with a little melted chocolate thrown in for good measure. So Jake whipped up the cream mixture while Kaycie and I began to unroll the cake. Disaster! We were distressed to find that the cake was sticking to the towel, falling apart and it looked a little soggy. We knew there was no way we would be able to spread the mocha cream over the cake and then roll it back up.

Jake came up with the great idea to use whatever parts of the soggy cake we could salvage and make it into something like a trifle. We found some cute little glasses, filled up a pastry bag with the cream mixture and we started layering the cream and the soggy cake. We were almost finished when a piece of chocolate got stuck in the pastry bag. I held it over the sink and kept squeezing the bag to push out the chocolate when suddenly the bag exploded all over my kitchen window covering the blinds and glass with mocha whipped cream. Good Times.

Jake finished filling the glasses by hand and then topped each glass with a Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookie.

This is what we ended up with.

This is what it should have looked like....oh well.



Despite all of our struggles our little desserts turned out great. Jake wants to name them 3 Layers of Heaven and is already making plans to include layers of melted chocolate and caramel the next time we make them. Kaycie wanted to name them Chocolate Layer Yumm Yumm.

Despite our struggles this was one of the best baking days we have had together. Jake and Kaycie worked well as a team and really seemed to have fun together. They blew out the yolks and whites out of eggs and made egg people while the cake was baking.



On the last page of the book My Life in France Julia Child wrote " Good results require that one take time and care. If one doesn't use the freshest ingredients or read the whole recipe before starting, and if one rushes through the cooking, the result will be an inferior taste and texture. But a careful approach will result in a magnificent burst of flavor, a thoroughly satisfying meal, perhaps even a life-changing experience"

Good advice I need to remember.