Chocolate Meringue Roulade with Raspberries & Whipped Cream

and raspberry coulis

Jun 22, 2024

∙ Paid

I’m a little bit bursting with excitement because I cannot wait for you to see this week’s substack recipe. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Anddd, bbs’ newest is paired with it! ;-)

new on bbs

Raspberry Coulis

Super simple raspberry coulis made with fresh raspberries. Mix in a pot with a bit of sugar and starch and cook until just broken down. Strain, chill, then use the sauce to drizzle over desserts and baked goods.

heat wave coolers

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

Easy, homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream that’s unbearably creamy and studded with endless little bits of crispy dark mint chocolate.

Raspberry Sorbet

Three ingredients, 10 minutes and a food processor are all you need to make this raspberry sorbet. It freezes soft so it’s always scoop-able, and it absolutely bursts with a sharp, fresh berry flavor.

reader review

“Awesome cake. The cake has a lovely light texture. Great light citrus notes from the zest. I used the reduction in the middle and recommend it for the added strawberry flavor & sweetness. We loved it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but also yummy on its own. I will make again and again!” - Maryann on Simple Strawberry Cake

weekly reads & notes

“…raising avocados is economically beneficial in the short term for farmers, which in Latin America typically means medium-sized operators and agribusinesses. It also helps growers – people in rural areas who grow subsistence crops. Over time, though, every serving of avocado toast takes a toll on Michoacán's land, forests and water supply. Rural growers, who lack the resources of large-scale farmers, feel those impacts most keenly.” Avocados are a "green gold" export for Mexico, but growing them is harming forests and waters, Salon.
“But perfectly cylindrical and cube croissants are made in tight molds, which at a certain point prevent these layers from expanding the way they would if left unencumbered on a sheet pan. This frequently has a few negative effects. While the layers look cool pressed into neat sides and edges, the lack of space between them means the steam coming off the butter has nowhere to go. Often, this method results in a denser, greasier pastry, the opposite of what croissants should be at their best — buttery but still light, with lots of space between the layers. The same thing happens when bakers try to do too much to croissants by piling, say, heavy cookie dough on top — the layers are prevented from expanding.” Can We Please Let Croissants Be Croissants? Eater.
The winners of 2024’s ‘Pink Lady Food Photographs’ have been announced and the collection is a must see. Some photos are clearly painstakingly staged, but others, especially the ones that capture a busy moment (like the street food section) are just so incredibly captivating. There are even two from my second home, Oman! I think this one from Bangladesh is my favorite (this one from China has to be a close second).
A note on freezing cookie dough: last year I spent a few weeks making several cookie doughs and freezing a portion of the dough so I could bake them all at once (the goal was to make a video to compare my different ccc recipes). I noticed that the cookies (almost of them!) didn’t look the same as they usually do; the edges were darker and they had spread less. Since I knew the initial batch I’d baked turned out fine, it had to be something that wasn’t dough related. I immediately suspected my oven, a usual culprit, but two external thermometers confirmed that the oven was fine. Then, it had to be something about the dough that had changed… ah, ofc, I was baking from frozen. But what does that do exactly? A deep dive into reddit’s baking subs brought me to the answer: when a dough is baked from frozen the sugars will caramelize and the proteins will set before the fat (butter in this case) melts; this is why they weren’t spreading, but were browning too much. Since then I’ve been going back and rewriting almost all my cookie recipes to say: don’t bake from frozen, instead let the dough come to a cool room temperature then bake in order to replicate the result you’d get if you had baked the dough without freezing it.
This week’s baking focused on a lemon icebox cake, a blueberry loaf and some ice cream bars (these will be member exclusive recipes spread out over the summer) which I wanted to retest before sharing. There was also a lot of sourdough happening because, in the summer with my kitchen temperature up by some 10 degrees, I have to feed my starter twice a day. This leaves me with an abundance of discard which I then incorporated into almost every flat bread, scone and muffin I made (some were successes I’ll explore more again, some were just awful ;p).
Recently I’ve gotten to try two trendy pastries: a cookie dough croissant (from a farmer’s market) and a flat croissant (from a bakery in Virginia Beach). Neither were very good tbh, which is no fault of the bakers as flavor was on point, I just don’t think the textures work together or are memorable enough to justify the work (yep, I was totally nodding along as I read Saxena’s Eater article). However, at another bakery in VB (Prosperity Kitchen & Pantry - highly recommend!) I tried a sourdough croissant and it might’ve been the best croissant I’ve ever eaten. Now I’m obsessed with replicating that flavor so I’m going to pull out my copy of Tartine Bread and see what I kind of damage can do to my butter budget =)

P.S. this week’s substack recipe is one of my favorite bakes I’ve made this year - are you ready?! ↓

for members