Matcha and Kiwi Swiss Roll!

I've never tried anything matcha before, and I've been itching to use it in a bake for a long time now, so I decided to start with a relatively easy bake where the flavour would not be fighting for the spotlight with other ingredients. Enter this Matcha and Kiwi Hurricane Swiss Roll!

This recipe comes from Nadiya Hussain's first book, a treasure trove I stumbled across in a charity shop! The thing I love most about Nadiya's book is that she provides step by step photos alongside her methods, making it so much easier to produce winning bakes!

A cross section of the Swiss 
roll, note the "hurricane" effect!

Making this roll look appealing 
on photos was so difficult because
of the kiwi puree (and my shocking
photography skills)!

Making a Swiss roll allowed me the opportunity to practice making a whisked sponge, as I'd not made this kind of sponge for a long time. The unique thing about this method is that you use no fat, and only three base ingredients. By whisking eggs and caster sugar until their volume has increased, and then folding in self raising flour, you produce a simple cake batter. 

For this recipe, the simple batter is poured into a baking tin, and then a second whisked sponge batter, containing matcha powder for colour and flavour, is piped on top. The hurricane effect is then created by running a skewer through both batters to encourage a kind of swirling effect before baking.

 

After baking, the sponge is turned out onto a sheet of greaseproof paper sprinkled with caster sugar. The cake is rolled up whilst still hot, then left to cool completely to make rerolling easier after the cake is filled.

The sponge is rolled up immediately 
after baking to encourage the
cooled sponge to roll again!

Filling this hurricane roll was very easy. After the sponge cools, it is unrolled, spread with both a kiwi puree and whipped double cream, before being rerolled and topped with the remaining kiwi puree. The kiwi pairs very well with the matcha in both colour and flavour, although I have to admit it turns out I'm not a massive fan of kiwi!

Not the perfect swirl, but 
a pretty good one!

Part of the Swiss roll's appeal for me is its versatility. It's so easy to flavour the sponge and switch up the filling to match. Swiss rolls are such a nostalgic treat, and I'm excited to revisit them sometime soon, hopefully with even more interesting flavour combinations!

Gibby x