Homemade Chocolate Arctic Roll
That is pretty much the extent of my motivation this evening, and it's taking mind over matter to make myself write the post. It's been one of those weekends that you get to 9pm on Sunday night and slowly breathe out. Lovely, and useful and productive and sociable, but ultimately also fairly tiring! And wasn't the one that ice-skated for 2hrs this afternoon - no wonder Mini-M almost fell asleep at the tea table.
So, this post is my Random Recipes challenge submission for this month (hosted as always at Belleau Kitchen). I've missed a few, which is a shame as it is a really fun one to participate in, and encourages you to use some of those hoarded recipe books and cook outwit your comfort zone from time to time, and I'm glad to be joining in again this month.
The specific details of the challenge this time around were a) to make something sweet and b) to use the internet to randomly select a recipe, based on a particular ingredient or dish. I asked Mr E to choose the inspirational ingredient and he chose black cherries (a la black forest gateau).
After a bit of Googling I decided I wanted to make this Chocolate, black cherry and vanilla Arctic Roll.
I had a 1-shop, 1-time window for ingredient procurement, and the supermarket I chose didn't have cherry jam or black cherries in any form (well, aside form that weird gloomy cherry pie filling that I think has probably seen very few real cherries!).
So as is my habit, I used strawberry jam instead. Jam is jam is jam after all!
As well as switching the jam, I halved the recipe, and to make it dairy free, used some of the very delicious Booja Booja "Keep Smiling Vanilla M'Gorilla" vanilla flavour ice cream. It is awesome stuff - coconut based and tastes fantastic and luxurious, and this desert certainly lets it be the star of the show. I softened it slightly and mixed the jam through, rather than a coating around the edges, and that seemed to work well.
But apart from that, I completely followed the recipe ;-) The sponge is dairy free without any modification which is always nice into the bargain - reduces my margin for random errors.
I've not replicated the recipe here, but encourage you to try it out if you fancy a nostalgic nod back to the semi-melted pudding of your childhood - it's a far superior product, and much easier than the end result would have you think.
