Audax Artifex

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

This month's challenge was a a surprise it was to make a bombe using home-made ice cream with fudge sauce with a covering of Swiss Rolls. This was going to a fun challenge. I thought I would be a trial bombe and then make another one for my birthday party.

The recipe for this month’s challenge has been adapted from this Swiss swirl ice cream cake from the Taste of Home website. Slices of Swiss roll are used to line a bowl and then filled with vanilla ice-cream, hot fudge ice cream topping and chocolate ice cream. The picture looked like so much fun that I have been waiting to make it for a while. What better timing than to make it along with fellow daring bakers to celebrate my three years with this amazing group. I have taken the basic idea from the above website and have developed the recipe. Hope you like it. The recipe does not require a lot of hands on time, but definitely requires a lot of cooling and freezing time between layers. Unlike the original recipe, we are going to make each layer from scratch. So, if you are planning to make it in one day, it might be a bit of a struggle.

Here is a link to the PDF of the challenge recipe.

Chilli chocolate fudge Swiss swirl cake with four flavoured ice creams (an experimental trial)
It has been so cold in Sydney (the coldest in sixty years at night it's below zero Celsius burrrr!!!!) that I thought I would spice up the recipe a little to make it more summery also I needed to experiment a little because I want to make another ice cream swirl cake for my birthday party on Saturday. So I decided to do four types of ice cream since I had a lot of the crème anglaise already frozen left from the last challenge I used these leftovers to made sour cherry ice cream and coffee ice cream and used the challenge recipes to make chopped pistachios with pistachio nut butter ice cream, and vanilla ice cream. I have been making vanilla-sugar for the last two months I used that instead of the minced and chopped vanilla bean in the recipes. (To make vanilla-sugar place a few vanilla beans in sugar and wait for a fortnight or much longer, vanilla-sugar delivers a very intense vanilla flavour to your recipes much stronger than using fresh beans!). I made the chocolate Swiss rolls (adding a reasonable amount ½ tsp of chilli powder) and filled it with half cream and half hot fudge with a touch of chilli powder I've had too much chocolate lately and couldn't face a large amount of it in this cake. I made sure the Swiss rolls where mini-sized so I could line the bombe with a large number of swirl slices.

I added a 1/8 teaspoon of dry mustard powder and two plain melted marshmallows to each cup of ice cream; the use of mustard powder has been shown to increase the intensity of the flavour of ice creams so I always include a touch in all of my ice creams, while using melted marshmallows helps stop the formation of large ice crystals in hand-beaten ice cream. Of course most bakers know that chilli powder intensives the flavour of chocolate in recipes. The use of mustard powder and chilli powder stimulates the taste buds which makes them more receptive to the other major flavour components in your ice cream, you shouldn't be able to taste the mustard in ice cream recipes. Of course I placed the cocoa powder for the Swiss roll in the boiling water since it has been shown that cocoa powder flavour is intensified in cakes if placed in a hot liquid for a few minutes. I also lined the bottom of the ice cream cake with slices since I had enough to do it and covered that with the vanilla ice cream for some reason the vanilla ice cream soaked into the slices so you couldn't really see that layer in the photos but you could really taste it in the final cake.

I did notice that I needed almost 2 litres of ice cream as per the recipes to fill the 1½ litre bombe (in fact a Chinese soup bowl) I used I think this is because I made the ice cream by hand and not in an ice cream maker which aerates the produce so much better than just beating the ice cream with a hand mixer every 30 minutes or so.

OMG when I opened the ice cream cake to study it the smell of it was amazing ice cream usually doesn't have an odour but this Swiss swirl cake did you could smell it across the kitchen to the dining room it smelt strongly of vanilla then coffee with an undertone of pistachio. I'm not sure why the smell was so strong.

The final ice cream Swiss roll cake had very strongly flavoured layers each distinct yet the overall flavour profile was harmonious. I really liked the look of the final dessert and the chocolate cake layer was just enough chocolate for the rest of the flavours. The hot chilli chocolate swirls were a great foil against the flavoured ice creams.

Some notes
1. Remember to make the flavourings very strong for the ice cream since cold substances slightly numb the taste buds.
2. Whipped cream or whipped evaporated milk, melted marshmallows, gelatine and beaten eggs are all additives used to prevent the formation of large ice crystals in ice cream as well as to improve or vary flavour.
3. Let the finished ice cream sit for at least four hours to help develop flavour.
4. See this blog posting on how to test scientifically when the Swiss roll batter is ready (i.e. when it has a specific gravity of .5 to .55) I used this method it really does work and takes all of the guess work out of the perfect Swiss Roll this will really open your eyes on how professionals do it I always do this now. See here for some excellent examples of jar-dropping beautiful Swiss Rolls on the same blog.

Filling the bombe with the first layer of ice cream

The completed Swiss swirl bombe

The cut bombe

Not a bad trial overall now for the birthday cake version! Total time for this recipe was about 10 hours mostly waiting for the ice cream to set and harden etc, it really is a fairly simple recipe. Thank so much Sunita for such a wonder recipe and all the fabulous step-by-step photos. This is such a fun dessert for kids and they would just love helping to make it.

Birthday Bombe
For my birthday swirl ice cream cake I made three types of Swiss rolls, prickly pear (which tastes like watermelon), boiled chocolate treacle and vanilla sugar. For the ice creams I made my favourite flavours – (red layer) Mixed Berries, (middle layer) saffron, honey and candied fig, and (last layer) blue champagne.

It was such a pretty cake with nice contrasting flavours it went down well at the party. I made 3 cakes like this for the party since I had a lot of people attending. The party was held over two days and about 60 people attended at various stages it was fantastic I had a wonderful time and my present from my friends was a week's holiday in New Zealand at the end of the month and a huge food processor from my family.