French Fridays with Dorie - Blueberry Marscapone Roulade

From the 10 basic ingredients required for today's recipe I could use "guilt free" {see millions of food intolerances in previous post}only...one. The blueberries! So I kept the blueberries, but made two versions of the rest.

Let me explain...{make a cup of tea and eat a slice of your roulade, it's going to take some time}

Georgie cannot have all-purpose-flour because it contains gluten, right? Right! So I used a mix of potato starch, corn starch, millet flour, chestnut flour and arrowroot flour with a dash of guar gum and two tablespoons of baking powder (GF off course!!) to substitute one ingredient - not really frugal nor cost effective, but oh well...

He cannot have eggs - whites and yolks -  which means no meringue and off course no fluffy yellow cake !!! How was I to substitute the eggs? That was a real brain-teaser. I opted for a no egg meringue using egg substitute and water. I whisked those two into submission and I finally got something that could easily pass for a meringue. As for the yolks, more egg substitute and water... 

Instead of adding the vanilla essence into the cream filling, I cut open a vanilla pod and scraped the seeds into the batter to disguise the intensity of the flour mix. 

As for the sugar, I used stevia for the cake and rice syrup for the blueberries and coconut flour instead of icing sugar. 

So far so good and to tell you the truth that was the scariest part of the process, but I put the mix in the oven and it didn't fall apart and what's more, it rose a couple of centimetres (hooray!). Compared to Dorie's version in the book photograph it looked like a very thick crepe but the taste was surprisingly good. No flour smell or after-taste, nice vanilla aroma and quite sweet to the tooth. 

Where things went horribly wrong was with the filling! This miracle of Italian cheese mastery is a no, no, no, for both me and Georgie. There was no way around it. It had to be substituted. I though that I could cheat a little bit and bought lactose free double cream, which I subsequently proceeded in whisking it into a quite firm chantilly. Then I whipped a bit of coconut milk with a pinch of guar gum to a thick enough consistency to be added to the chantilly. But when I put those two together the chantilly gave way and started to liquify. I put the whole thing in the fridge for an hour hoping that the coconut milk will solidify with the cold and keep a thick texture. It did, but not enough. I gave up, poured the blueberries into the almost liquid cream and spread them on my thick pancake of a cake. The taste again was really, really, nice. The sweetness of the coconut milk and the blueberries saved the day, but the visual effect was not very appealing. 

They say that hunger starts from the eyes, but well, in my case I would definitely win only if I served this to a person with very advanced cataract! Lesson learned. Next time a recipe calls for dairy free filling I will go for the traditional, yet boring way and use soja based products. 

Time to unveil the product of my labour...

The Gluten Free, Lactose Free, Sugar Free, Egg Free Blueberry Roulade

I mentioned at the beginning that I made two versions, the "Free from Everything" and Dorie's original with eggs and meringue and Marscapone and sugar. I did not taste it. Not even to lick the leftover filling from the bowl (yes I am that strong and I pay a lot in therapy for that reason). Georgie's colleagues said it was divine: the cake was fluffy and the filling light and quite refreshing (their words I swear).

This was a real challenge. I believe that some recipes are not meant to be tempered with. A roulade needs a fluffy cake and you cannot have this without the eggs. Maybe if I was a chemist I could come up with a different way to emulate the effect of a beaten egg white has in a mix of flour and eggs but I am not. I am just happy that with next week's recipe, I do not have to change anything!

To see how other bloggers made the Blueberry Marscapone Roulade, check out French Fridays with Dorie where we make recipes from Dorie Greenspan's Around my French Table.