Chocolate biscuit roll with bananas and cream cheese cream

This is one of the variants of the French festive dessert "Christmas Log". A roll cake with cream, resembling a cut of a tree, and with a pattern on top - a tree bark - a reference to the old rite of burning a log to protect the family from trouble. In this version of the biscuit roll, bananas go great with chocolate biscuit and delicate custard-based cream cheese.

Ingredients

• For test:
• Eggs - 3 pcs.
• Sugar - 60 g
• Flour - 140 g
• Cocoa powder - 3 tbsp. spoons
• Baking powder - 0.5 tsp
• For cream:
• Cream cheese - 500 g
• Milk - 200 ml
• Egg - 1 pc.
• Powdered sugar - 60 g
• Flour - 2 tbsp. spoons
• Vanilla sugar - 10 g
• For filling:
• Bananas - 330 g (1.5-2 pcs.)
• For decoration:
• Cocoa powder - 30 g

Directions

1. Choose good quality products.
2. Eggs should be cold - take them out of the refrigerator just before cooking. To prepare the sponge cake, separate the egg whites from the yolks.
3. Sift the flour into a bowl (140 g of flour is a glass with a capacity of 200 ml with a slide).
4. Let's start by making the biscuit dough. Sift cocoa powder and baking powder into a bowl with flour. Stir.
5. Pour cold proteins into a deep bowl.
6. Start beating the whites with a mixer at low speed until foam appears (2-3 minutes).
7. In 2-3 doses, add half the sugar, without stopping the mixer. Gradually increase the speed.
8. Beat egg whites with sugar until stiff peaks. Whipping time depends on the power of the equipment. It took me 7-8 minutes. If the protein mass does not drain when the bowl is turned over, then the proteins are beaten well.
9. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.
10. In a separate deep bowl, combine the yolks and the second half of the sugar.
11. Beat the yolks with sugar with a mixer until fluffy and white. It took me 3-4 minutes to do this.
12. In 2-3 doses, add flour with cocoa powder and baking powder to the protein mass. Stir the egg whites with a spatula after each addition of the flour mixture.
13. After the introduction of dry ingredients, the mass became quite dense.
14. Add the yolks and mix well with a spatula.
15. Next time I'll add whipped egg whites without mixing them with flour to better keep the dough airy.
16. Line a baking sheet with good quality parchment paper. Lay out the biscuit dough and spread with a spatula over the entire baking sheet. I got a cake measuring 30x30 cm. Send the baking sheet to the oven, heated to 200 degrees, for 8-10 minutes.
17. When baking, focus on your oven. The dough should set well on top, but do not bake the biscuit cake for a long time, otherwise it may break when folding.
18. Roll the hot biscuit immediately into a roll along with parchment on a damp towel. Wrap the roll in a damp towel and leave to cool completely.
19. To prepare the cream, sift the flour into a saucepan, pour in the milk.
20. Place the saucepan over moderate heat and, constantly stirring the milk and flour with a spatula, heat until thickened. Since I constantly stirred the milk-flour mixture, it did not reach a boil.
21. Remove the saucepan from the heat and wait 3-4 minutes for the mixture to cool slightly.
22. Add the egg to the saucepan and quickly stir the mixture until smooth.
23. Cool the custard mass to room temperature. To speed up this process, I lowered the stewpan into a container of cold water and constantly stirred the mass.
24. Pour the custard base into the cream cheese bowl. Mix the cream with a mixer until smooth.
25. Add powdered sugar and vanilla sugar. Stir again. The cream is ready.
26. Peel bananas.
27. Unroll the biscuit roll. If it sticks to the paper, carefully, so as not to break the integrity of the cake, detach it from the parchment with a knife. Lubricate the biscuit with a layer of cream (I used almost half of the cream). Put peeled bananas on the edge of the cake (one and a half banana was enough for me).
28. Wrap banana in biscuit roll with cream.
29. My "log" will be "knotty" - for this I made several slices of the roll. You can leave the chocolate roll whole.
30. Take a suitable dish for shaping the cake. I used slate board. Lay out the roll. Attach the cut pieces to it, so that they look like saw cut branches.
31. To decorate the cake with cream, I used a pastry bag with an asterisk nozzle. Spread the remaining cream evenly over the entire surface of the biscuit roll. If you don’t have a nozzle, just cover the “log” with cream and make grooves on top with a fork that imitate the texture of tree bark.
32. Chocolate biscuit roll with butter cream and bananas, sprinkle with cocoa powder using a strainer.
33. For the decor of the festive biscuit roll "Christmas Log" I also used icing snowflakes.
34. Send the New Year's cake to the refrigerator for 2-3 hours to soak.