I Love the Refreshing Aftertaste!

Earl Grey Tea Cake Roll with Fig & Cream Filling This is the best outcome I got from a few try-outs I did this summer. Dear readers, this is supposed to be “earl grey tea cake roll with fig and cream filling.” Weird? Different? But this was not as bad as you might think, honestly. I got the idea of this unique cake roll from our local pastry shop’s “ Cake roll of the month.” The one displayed at the shop looked so scrumptious, but was expensive, so I thought about making one myself. It is fig season now and the fruit is on the shelf at almost every supermarket. So why not?! I googled for a recipe of “black tea cake roll” and found one at a Japanese recipe site. It needed to be downsized to half, but seemed suitable for what I was going to make. The twist was, of course, the fig; I expected that adding it to the cream filling would make the rolling-up part difficult, and I was right. This was by no means an excellent job, but I have an excuse. My small oven can only take 18x18 cm square cake pan inside, and it’s more difficult to roll up when the sponge cake is smaller. (Right?) And with the fruit chunks in the filling, you know. Maybe I should have baked a thinner sponge and let the air out of the batter more thoroughly before baking. Tastewise, this wasn't bad at all, honestly. The cream-and-fig combination was nice with the pleasant crunchiness of the fig seeds. What I loved the most was the refreshing aftertaste from the ground earl grey tea leaves in the sponge cake. I’m interested in trying "earl grey cake roll" with other fruits like pear or persimmon in the filling, so there will be several more cake roll entries on this blog this autumn. Don’t get dizzy ;)