Fresh Berry Charlotte Royale

Airy mousse dressed in slices of swirly swiss roll. Go big or go home, right? # 83: Fresh Berry Charlotte Royale

It’s a swiss roll . . . it’s a mousse . . . it’s a charlotte royale! There’s so many individual elements to this dessert, reading through the recipe made my head spin. With the help of some highlighters and sticky notes, I translated it into straight-forward, simple steps. All you need is a chunk of time, lots of fridge space and plenty of berries and dairy.

This is another one of those redemption bakes. Remember the charlotte I tried in February 2017? It turned into a trifle due to the gelatin not cooperating. Sigh. I took the time and watched videos of how to use powdered gelatin. Nerdy, I know, but useful! I also watched ZoëBakes’s step-by-step videos on how to make this recipe at least twice all the way through. If you haven’t started following her, you should! Her videos are amazing helpful and just plain fun to watch.

Just a girl and her cake.

The sponge recipe called for a mix of cake flour and all-purpose flour to make it light and airy. I can’t go back to life without a kitchen scale – it’s just so handy!

It’s amazing how floofy eggs and sugar can get. I whipped them a little more after this picture, so the ribbon stayed on top when drizzle-tested. If it melts back into the mass below then it’s not ready.

I sprayed the pan before lining it with parchment paper so the paper stayed put.

Getting ready to flip out the sponge. Sugar, sugar everywhere.

Wa-bam!

Removing the parchment paper reeally carefully so as not the rip the sponge.

After rolling it and letting it cool, I unrolled it and painted on the jam. I mixed raspberry and strawberry, cause why not?

Re-rolled, slightly frozen, and sliced into discs.

Lining the bowl with plastic wrap is supposed to help ease it out completed dessert at the end. Spoiler: it definitely helped!

A jammy optical illusion.

I only put 1.5 ounces of cointreau into the custard instead of the whole 5 ounces the recipe called for. It just seemed like too much liquid! Next time I’ll throw in some orange extract to add some flavor oomph.

Just like making pastry cream, you mix in a little bit of the scalded milk first before dumping it all in to temper the egg yolks.

I let the gelatin “bloom” before using it. (I mixed it with water and let it solidify.) Who was the first person to use gelatin? It looks beyond inedible.