Home › Cake Making and Baking › Roll Jelly Cake (Jelly Roll)
Roll Jelly Cake (Jelly Roll)
3 eggs (beaten separately) 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons sweet milk 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup Five Roses flour Lemon flavoring Beat the yolks with the sugar and sweet milk. Beat the whites to a stiff froth, then thoroughly with the yolks and sugar. Mix the flour and baking powder and add to other ingredients. Flavor with lemon and bake immediately in moderately hot oven.
Note for Jelly Rolls-While hot, remove from pan and lay on cloth wrung out of cold water. Sprinkle a little sugar on cloth, and while cake is still warm spread with jelly and roll quickly, putting your hands under the cloth. This helps to keep cake from cracking. If there are any crusty edges that might interfere with proper rolling, these should be trimmed off with a sharp knife while still hot.
A plain sponge with no fat in it, baked thin and rolled while hot. Everything depends on speed after it leaves the oven.
- The hinge: roll it hotA fatless sponge stays pliable only while warm and steamy. Turn it out, trim, spread and roll within two or three minutes of leaving the oven; once it cools it will crack along every bend.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figure; "moderately hot" is usually rendered as somewhere in the 375-400F range. Baked as a thin sheet it should be done quickly, roughly 10-13 minutes, and should spring back when pressed rather than brown deeply.
- Pan sizeNo pan is named. Use a rimmed sheet of roughly 10 by 15 inches, greased and lined with parchment, so the batter sits about a quarter-inch deep. In a smaller pan the cake bakes thick and will not roll.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk called for elsewhere in these books. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Lemon flavoringLemon extract, about half a teaspoon; the zest of one lemon works as well and tastes better. The wording suggests a bottled essence rather than fresh fruit.
- The damp clothA clean tea towel wrung out in cold water and dusted with sugar keeps the surface from sticking and drying. Sugar alone on a dry towel also works, but the damp cloth is what buys you extra rolling time.
- Jelly consistencyStir the jelly loose before spreading so you are not tearing at a warm, fragile crumb. Leave a half-inch bare at the far edge or it will squeeze out as you roll.
- Beating the whites inThe text says "then thoroughly with the yolks"; a light hand is safer than hard beating. The batter has no butter, so the whipped whites contribute much of its lift, alongside a generous two teaspoons of baking powder.
- YieldOne roll of about 10 inches, cutting into 8 to 10 slices.
Jelly rolls belong to a family of thin rolled sponges that spread through nineteenth-century English and American baking under names like jelly cake, Swiss roll and roulade -- the "Swiss" label is generally traced to English usage rather than to Switzerland. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, was a flour promotion, so its cake chapter is heavy with sponges of exactly this kind: cheap, quick, and a fair test of a household flour. That the recipe leans on baking powder and separately beaten eggs rather than a long creaming of butter and sugar puts it firmly in the era after chemical leaveners became a kitchen staple, when a cake could be mixed and in the oven inside ten minutes.