Jelly Roll Cake

I whipped up a chocolate jelly roll cake tonight for a dessert I am planning to finish tomorrow. A jelly roll cake is a large, flat cake that is filled and rolled up into a log. As the name suggests, it can be filled with jelly, but it can also be filled with a wide variety of other fillings. A few examples are: whipped cream, frosting, peanut butter, chocolate spread, jam, ganache, buttercream, and even ice cream. These cakes are baked in a large pan, which is essentially a cookie sheet with sides. It is not actually a jelly roll unless you fill it with jelly and roll it up, so I guess what I'm making is called a chocolate roll. You can make cakes in a jelly roll pan without rolling them, called sheet cakes; this way you get a large cake to feed a crowd, with some icing on every bite! An example of this is Chocolate Texas Sheet Cake, which is an excellent dessert option for potlucks. Here is the master recipe I normally use to make jelly rolls. It is a pretty simple and straight-forward recipe. To make a chocolate jelly roll, I just replace 1/4 cup of flour with unsweetened cocoa powder.

Jelly Roll Cake
4 eggs, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup water
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup all-purpoise flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
icing sugar

Grease 10x15-inch jelly roll pan. Line with waxed paper.
Beat eggs in mixing bowl until frothy. Add sugar and beat until light colored and thick. Mix in water and vanilla.
Sift flour, baking powder and salt over egg mixture and fold in.
Turn into prepared pan. Bake in 400◦F oven for 12-15 minutes until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Sift icing sugar over tea towel. Turn cake out onto sugar. Peel off waxed paper. Trim crisp edges if any. Roll from narrow end, towel and cake together. Cool. Unroll. Fill with filling. Reroll.

Here is a picture of my cake roll cooling.

Paré, Jean. "Jelly Roll." Recipe. Desserts, Edmonton Alberta: Company's Coming Publishing Limited, 1989. 22