Jelly Roll
1 cup sugar 1 cup Gold Medal flour 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 3 eggs 6 tablespoons of hot water Mix and sift the dry ingredients, stir in eggs well beaten, add the hot water, beat the batter well, pour into a smooth, well greased pan. The batter should be put one-fourth of an inch deep, for if thicker the cake will not roll nicely. Bake slowly. When done turn the cake onto a sheet of brown paper, well dusted with powdered sugar. Beat the jelly with a fork and spread on the cake. With a sharp knife trim off all crusty edges, roll it up by lifting one side of the paper. The cake will break, if allowed to cool before rolling. To keep the roll perfectly round, roll it up in a cloth until cool.
A whole-egg sponge sheet with no fat and no liquid but six tablespoons of hot water. It works, but the margin between rollable and cracked is about three minutes of oven time.
- The hinge: roll it hotThe cake must be turned out, spread and rolled while it is still hot enough to be flexible. Have the sugared paper, the beaten jelly and a clean towel laid out before the pan comes from the oven; there is no time to assemble anything afterward.
- "Bake slowly" needs a numberThe phrase points to a slow-to-moderate oven rather than a hot one; something around 325F is a reasonable reading for a sheet this thin. It is done as soon as the surface springs back and the edges just shrink from the pan, which will be well under twenty minutes. Any longer and it dries and cracks rather than rolls.
- PanA large shallow pan is wanted; a 10-by-15-inch jelly-roll pan comes closer to the quarter-inch depth the recipe insists on than a 9-by-13 would. Grease it and line the bottom with parchment; the instruction not to make the batter thicker is the one dimension in the recipe that is not negotiable.
- Beating the eggs"eggs well beaten" most likely means the whole eggs beaten until thick and pale and falling from the beater in a band, though the recipe does not say how far to take them. The air beaten in works alongside the 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder, which is itself a generous measure for a cup of flour.
- Salt and flavouringThere is neither in the original. A quarter teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla are worth adding; the sponge is otherwise very plain against a sweet filling.
- FlourGold Medal was milled from hard spring wheat, so a modern all-purpose flour is a reasonable stand-in, if a slightly softer one. Substituting cake flour by weight gives a softer, more forgiving crumb that cracks less on the roll.
- Brown paperUse parchment dusted with powdered sugar, or a clean thin tea towel dusted the same way. Modern brown grocery paper is not intended for food contact and sticks besides.
- The jellyBeating jelly with a fork breaks the set so it spreads without tearing the cake; currant, apple and quince jellies were among the kinds a household of the period might have had. Warm it slightly if it still drags, and keep the layer thin or it squeezes out at the ends.
- YieldOne roll, about ten slices.
Jelly roll belongs to a family of thin rolled sponges that spread through nineteenth-century American and English baking; in Britain the comparable cake is the Swiss roll, a name whose origin is unclear and which is not thought to come from Switzerland. The technique depended on two things becoming ordinary in home kitchens: reliable chemical leavening, here baking powder, and an oven steady enough to bake a quarter-inch sheet without scorching it. Its appearance in a flour company's cook book is no accident: books like this one were published to sell sacks of a specific brand.