Gluten Free Strawberries and Cream Swiss Roll

crappy pictures of our yummy dessert

Mr M and I recently celebrated our birthdays (they're only a couple days apart) and we made some yummy desserts to celebrate. It's been a long time since I shared a recipe or talked about specific things we make, but I've got two to share- one today, one tomorrow.

One advantage to having a June birthday is the abundance of strawberries. As a teenager I picked strawberries every summer for a local farmer and we could eat as many as we liked (though we usually didn't, since we got paid by the quart and the more you ate the less you were paid). Despite that, I still love strawberries.

For my cake, I made this super yummy strawberries and cream swiss roll.  Naturally, it had to be gluten free, so I subbed a gluten free flour blend (Authentic Foods Multi-Blend Flour). The advantage of using this blend is that I was able to do a straight substitution, though I did decrease the amount of flour the original recipe called for, as directed by the flour package (3/4 cup flour blend for 1 cup wheat flour).

I wasn't sure how the gf flour would react to being rolled up, but I followed the directions for rolling up the cake right out of the oven, and didn't have any problems unrolling, spreading the filling, and re-rolling the cake. No cracking or falling apart, so yay me!

The recipe called for 6 oz cream cheese, but I used the the whole 8 oz in the package, because what would we do with the leftover 2 oz of cream cheese? We don't eat many bagels in our house. The extra cream cheese made the cream portion thicker and harder to spread, but it tasted good :) I used the cool whip the recipe called for, but next time I'll try it with real whipped cream since we don't usually eat fake food like cool whip. I used it this time because I didn't want to mess with the original recipe too much the first time through.

I was half expecting the taste of that chemical-filled white cream in the Little Debbie strawberry shortcake rolls (I used to love those back when I was still eating gluten), but the cream cheese gave it a thicker, richer, much more satisfying taste. While there were chemicals from the cool whip, using real whipped cream would eliminate them.

We didn't have any strawberry jam, so I just sliced up some strawberries, sprinkled them with a bit of maple sugar (so yummy!), and mashed them a little with a potato masher. I then spread the lightly mashed strawberries on the cake, though I think using sliced, non-mashed strawberries would work well also.

This isn't a super-quick dessert: you need time for the cake to cool completely before you fill it, then it needs to sit in the fridge for at least an hour before you eat it. It takes a bit of time, but it wasn't hard to make. The hardest part was flipping the cake over onto the clean towel: I had visions of it falling to pieces in the process, but it didn't.

Everyone thought it was super yummy (Sunshine was almost licking her plate) and we will be making it again. Sunshine has declared this her "favorite cake ever!" My pictures are pretty crummy, but there's a very yummy-looking photo included with the original recipe, which totally pulled me in in the first place.