Roselle Sponge cake

This light and airy Roselle sponge cake has a unique fruity yet floral taste to it. You can create this cake with other dried flowers or even tea leaves if you like!

The benefits of Roselle are that it helps lower cholesterol, blood pressure, sore throat, and facilitates weight loss.

Happy early Valentine’s Day or Gal-entine’s day or Pal-entine’s day or Single awareness day or February 14^th if you don’t celebrate any of those I listed.

Whether I’m single or not, I love Valentine’s Day every year. It’s not that I go all out and throw a big party in celebration of it or anything but I just love, love.

As a matter of fact, growing up, whenever I had to provide my birthdays on websites, I would always pretend my birthday was Valentine’s Day.

I honestly don’t know where I got the idea to do that from and it’s not like I hated my actual birthday either (who wouldn’t want to be born on the same day as Britney Spears right?), but I guess if I had to choose a fake birthday, I might as well choose a date that I liked and could remember.

Anyways, enough about me and my fibber of a childhood self and onto the main focus of this post…the Roselle cake!

I don’t know if a majority of you have heard of Roselle because I only found out about this flower over the summer while I was in Asia.

Roselle’s popularity in Asia

Roselle is highly popular in Asia because of it’s light fruity fragrance, gorgeous colour and health benefits. Some of which include lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, healing coughs and sore throat, and it facilitates weight loss.

If I had to describe how it tastes like, I would have say that it resembles a blend of hibiscus and passion fruit because it’s more tart than floral in flavor.

Although I saw Roselle at practically every street corner, I have only seen it used in drinks.

So I decided to put my creative apron on and attempt to use it in a cake because it’s been a while since I’ve baked one up.

And what came out of the oven was the most gorgeously speckled cake ever!

How did it taste?

The lightness of the sponge cake allowed the delicate Roselle flavor shine through. I really liked how the flowers added hints of tartness to the sweet cake and I managed to put just enough flowers into the cake so that it wasn’t weighing it down.

Mother deer thought that it was pretty well balanced as well but said the flowers could of been blended a little finer since she thought the flowers were quite chewy in the sponge cake. I didn’t really mind though since I just saw it as filling in a cake. I would definitely make this again and perhaps try to experiment with baking with this gorgeous flower more in the near future!

Have a great Valentines Day!

What’s your favorite way to incorporate tea in baking?

-Cynthia

Roselle Sponge cake recipe

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