Voila! Here it is, the Chocolate Cake Roll I promised. You saw the chocolate cake roll yesterday, which I filled with my signature buttercream icing. Then I glazed it with a very simple chocolate glaze, and decorated with some more buttercream icing. I wanted to keep the flavours in this cake clean and simple, just classic chocolate and vanilla. It turned out very nice, delicious and chocolately, but not too rich and not too sweet. I will include the recipe for the chocolate glaze, because it is very easy and could come in handy for everything from cookies to brownies to cakes to cream puffs.
Simple Chocolate Glaze
1/4 cup unsalted butter, cut into small cubes
2/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup chocolate milk
Place the butter and chocolate in a heatproof bowl. Heat the milk until boiling, pour over the chocolate and butter and stir until smooth.
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
