A flick through made me determined to have a go at Cardinal Slice, a meringue and genoise layer slice made more complicated by the fact that the meringue and sponge mixtures are piped in stripes. It is supposed to look like this when fully assembled.
I have had some trouble with American recipes before so I shouldn't have been surprised when this didn't turn out quite as planned. The meringue, rather than being crisp was soft and soggy whilst the sponge was cooked through but had spread out into a flat covering. It tasted OK but there was no way it was coming off the paper. What I ended up with was a flat mess.
I may have a go at this again in the future, but I think if I did I might try cooking the meringue a little first, before adding the sponge into the gaps in the piping. This may make them crisper and mean that the slices may have half a chance of holding together and making themselves into a cake.I would also use my standard genoise recipe as it is less likely to leave three pints of mixture left over. There really is only so much sponge mix you can deal with in one go.
Not one to give up, the book suggests that you use the left over sponge mix (there was tonnes of the stuff) to make ladies finger biscuits. That sounded like a bit of a faff to me so I thought I would just bung the mixture into a swiss-roll tin and see what happened. Well it has made a soft thin sponge which has made the house smell heavenly. I thought rolling it was asking for trouble so took the easy route and cut it into three pieces and layered them with raspberry jam and fresh cream.
Not quite a victory, but pretty tasty and at least means that the whole mixture didn't go to waste.
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