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Chocolate Roll
Make a jelly roll and cover the outside with chocolate icing (recipes for making different sorts may be found in the index), and then pipe on a wreath pattern in white egg-icing.
This is a trade-manual entry: it assumes you already have a jelly roll and two icings in hand, and only tells you how to assemble and finish them. The hinges are all in the parts it leaves out.
- The roll itselfThe recipe assumes a jelly roll is already to hand and gives no formula. Period jelly rolls are generally a thin sheet of whisked sponge, baked hot and fast on a paper-lined shallow pan; some formulas use chemical leavening and some do not. It should be barely coloured and still flexible.
- Roll it warmTurn the sheet out onto sugared paper, spread the filling, and roll while it is still warm. A sponge left to cool flat will crack along the outside of the curve, and no amount of icing hides that ridge.
- "Egg-icing"This means what is now called royal icing: egg white beaten with sifted powdered sugar to a stiff piping consistency, sometimes with a few drops of lemon juice. It is uncooked, so use pasteurized whites or meringue powder if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Chocolate icing consistencyThe coating needs to be thick enough to sit on the curve without running to the base. Ice the roll on a rack over a tray and let the coat set firm before piping, or the white lines will sink into it and blur.
- The wreath patternThe recipe does not describe the pattern. A wreath in this context is most likely a looping garland or repeated festoon piped around the roll with a small plain tube rather than a single ring; piping in one direction along the length keeps the loops even.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or yield; it depends entirely on the size of sponge sheet used. Cut with a thin knife wiped between slices; set icing shatters under a dull blade.
- KeepingAssemble the day it is served. The icing seals the sponge reasonably well, but a jam-filled roll goes soggy at the seam within a day and the royal icing softens in a humid kitchen.
Rolled sponge cakes appear in English and American books from the mid-nineteenth century under a run of names — jelly roll, jelly cake roll, and later Swiss roll, a term usually traced to British bakers rather than to Switzerland, though the origin is not firmly documented. An entry like this one, which sends the reader to the index for its components, suggests how a manual of this kind could work: a standing sponge formula and a range of icings, with a 'new' cake made by recombining stock parts and adding a piped decoration. Chocolate icing as an all-over coating became more common as cocoa and eating chocolate grew cheaper and more widely available through the later nineteenth century.