In light of the Christmas festivities, a classic time for cooking and baking, I wanted to do something special. Since we don't eat Christmas cake or pudding in our house, I've been looking to having a range of possible alternatives that are just as tasty and special. So I settled on a trusty favourite - meringue roulade, by who else but baking queen Mary Berry herself. Since I already knew that Sam likes meringue, I thought this was a failsafe option, which I could easily spice up into a festive style.
Instead of fresh strawberries, I added home made cranberry sauce - there are many recipes online, but I picked this one from the Ocado website, and modified it to make it suitable for a dessert by omitting the shallots and doubling the amount of sugar recommended. Also, I didn't have any red wine open, so I thought I'd just substitute it with a little bit of port!
you can also see in the background the process of how I made the blue sugar star decorations. I used a recipe from the brilliant Sugar Hero with a very funny description of how she was inspired to make this recipe (from the show Breaking Bad, nothing at all to do with the festive recipe for which I'm using it here). The details for the sugar stars are at the end.
The recipe itself is pretty simple and starts off with making a very stiff meringue!
Since I wasn't using the almond flakes in this recipe, I added extra speaks for texture before baking in the oven.
After baking and leaving to cool, it was time to add the filling. Here I tweaked the recipe again a little, and used a Christmasy champagne double cream as a filling. After laying the cranberry sauce on top of it, the roll looked like this:
The extra space at the far end is required as when you roll up the roulade, the filling has a tendency to ooze out. This is nothing to worry about, and adds to the overall messy look to this tasty dessert! The rolling part is probably the trickiest, but it works best when you take the band aid approach - just do it in one, quick, swift movement!
Then we decorated the roulade with glitter sprinkles and the blue stars, like so:
It's quite easy to get the sugar shapes, just place some metal cookie cutters into the poured sugar while it is still molten. Then carefully pop them out when they've hardened.
I think it turned out reasonably well, and with a few tweaks, it could be really perfect. Unfortunately, Sam didn't really take to my cranberry sauce, I think that they were a little bit tart for him!
Sam: The meringue was lovely, it was a perfect mix of crunchy on the outside, and gooey and chewy on the inside. I'm not a big fan of cranberries, but the sauce tasted relatively nice. Overall, I'd give it 7/10
