The Big Jones Cookbook: Recipes for Savoring the Heritage of Regional Southern Cooking by Paul Fehribach

Author:Paul Fehribach [Fehribach, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Jelly Roll Cake

Seeing a recipe for a jelly roll in The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis was one of my personal development’s defining moments, and will always be special to me because I came to truly understand what was happening to American food culture. A classic case of industry making a home-cooked staple into an industrially produced snack.

Many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks offer recipes for jelly rolls while few modern cookbooks do, a rather peculiar disappearing act for something that was in the repertoire of many a home cook in the early twentieth century. In the meantime, one place that jelly roll cakes have continued to appear is the processed snack-cake rack in convenience stores and supermarkets. While I can’t say so authoritatively, it would seem that jelly rolls have been co-opted by the industrial bakeries and have for now been relegated to the status of junk food.

Jelly rolls offer many opportunities for dramatic presentation, and you also have seemingly endless options as far as jelly flavors or even custard or cream fillings go. You can serve these with ice cream, whipped cream, or on their own.

PREP TIME: 1 hour

EQUIPMENT NEEDED: jelly roll pan or 12-by-18-inch sheet pan with edges, baking parchment, pie pan, stand mixer with wire whip, sifter, large rubber spatula

MAKES: one 12-inch roll cake, serves 8 to 12

2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) unsalted butter, softened and divided

3/4 cup granulated sugar

4 large eggs

2 teaspoons ice water

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

3/4 cup all-purpose flour, sifted before measuring and resifted

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 cup jelly of choice, full flavored tart jellies such as currant jelly work best

Powdered sugar, for dusting

• Preheat oven to 375°F.

• Line a jelly roll pan, or 12-by-18-inch sheet pan with edges, with baking parchment by first buttering it with 1 tablespoon of the butter and then pressing the parchment into the bottom of the pan, using the butter as a kind of mortar. Leave a little excess parchment on the ends of the pan to make lifting the finished cake out of the pan easier. Butter the top of the parchment well and also the sides of the pan with the remaining tablespoon of butter.

• Place sugar in the hot oven in a pie pan to heat for 5 minutes. Break the eggs in the bowl of a stand mixer with the wire whip, and begin whipping on high speed until frothy, 1 to 2 minutes. Continue beating and add the ice water, then the hot sugar a couple tablespoons at a time until incorporated. Add the vanilla and salt and continue whipping until thick and foamy, another 6 to 8 minutes.

• Remove the bowl from the stand mixer, and fold in the flour in thirds, sifting the flour over the foamy egg mixture to prevent lumps. Turn the batter into your parchment-lined baking sheet. Use a spatula to carefully spread the batter evenly over the pan, all the way to the corners. Bake in the preheated oven until set and golden brown, 18 to 20 minutes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.