Home › Recipes › Baked Sponge Roll With Sauce
Baked Sponge Roll With Sauce
Make the sponge cake mixture according to the directions under the head of Savarin pudding. Rather use less sugar than more. Too much sugar is one frequent cause of poor sponge cake. Grease and flour some baking sheets or shallow roll pans. Spread the batter over them as thin as can be, just to cover the iron. Bake in a brisk oven about five minutes, run a knife down the sides to loosen the cake. Turn it upside down on a clean table and shake the cake loose.
Immediately spread red current jelly thinly all over and roll the cake up neatly. Serve warm, cut in suitable pieces, with a rich transparent sauce containing lemon juice and flavored poured over.
It is too much trouble and wastes time to bake these sponge sheets on sheets of paper. Very little practice is needed to use the bare pan with greater advantage. Sometimes it helps a bad bake to roll up a brittle sheet after the roll is made, in a sheet of paper to improve its shape. No one expected to find the above in a book of puddings, but Ruskin says that cookery means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices, and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves. We ought not to forget this white cocoanut souffle. It is good to use up white of eggs, and good for other purposes.
A jelly roll by another name, written for a cook who already knows the house sponge batter. Two things decide the outcome: how thin the sheet is spread, and how fast you roll it once it leaves the pan.
- Roll it hotThe sheet must be turned out, spread and rolled while still steaming. A sponge sheet that cools flat will crack along every fold when you try to curl it. Have the jelly loosened and stirred smooth before the cake comes out of the oven.
- A brisk ovenRead that as roughly 400-425F. A thin sheet needs high heat and a short bake so the surface sets before the crumb dries; the recipe's 'about five minutes' is the guide, and the cake should spring back rather than colour deeply.
- The batterThe cross-reference is to the book's savarin pudding sponge, which is not reproduced here, so its exact method and proportions cannot be checked from this page. Any standard jelly-roll sponge (4 eggs, about 2/3 cup sugar, 3/4 cup flour) behaves the same way. The warning about sugar is sound: excess sugar weakens the foam and gives a heavy, sticky sheet.
- Pan size"shallow roll pans" is not defined in the text; a rimmed sheet in the region of 10 by 15 inches will serve. Spread the batter as the recipe says, as thin as it can go, just enough to hide the metal, and level it with an offset spatula rather than tilting the pan.
- Paper, despite the authorThe objection to lining is about trouble and wasted time, as the text says. Parchment costs nothing in a home kitchen, releases cleanly, and lets you roll the hot sheet inside it to set the shape, which is close to the paper trick conceded at the end.
- Red currant jellyStill sold, usually in the jam aisle or an import section. It is chosen because it is tart and sets firmly enough not to soak the crumb. Warm and stir it before spreading; apricot or raspberry jelly, sieved of seeds, substitutes without complaint.
- The transparent sauceA period name for a clear cornstarch-thickened sugar sauce, not a custard: sugar and water simmered, thickened lightly with cornstarch or arrowroot, finished off the heat with butter and lemon juice so it stays glossy rather than clouding.
- YieldOne sheet gives a roll of eight to ten slices. Cut with a serrated knife in a sawing motion; pressing down flattens the spiral.
- The last sentenceThe closing line about a white cocoanut souffle reads as a lead-in to the entry that follows rather than anything to do with the roll; whether it is the author's own transition or a printer's slip cannot be told from the page.
The jelly roll belongs to a nineteenth-century vogue for rolled sponges that ran through American and British cookery under a scatter of names -- rolled jelly cake, Swiss roll, roulade -- all depending on the same thing, that a thin egg-foam sheet stays pliable only briefly after it leaves the oven. What makes this version worth reading is the voice around it: the instructions are about pan economy and bad bakes rather than about measurements, and the writer bothers to argue that lining sheets with paper wastes time. The Ruskin quotation, dropped in to justify putting a cake in a chapter of puddings, is a small piece of late-Victorian self-improvement literature turning up in a cookery book: cookery presented as a liberal art rather than a wage. The passage was widely quoted as Ruskin's in cookbooks of the period, usually in exactly this defensive spirit, though it is generally reproduced without a source.