Itsy Bitsy Foodies

Over the years I recall seeing red jelly roll cakes for Valentine’s Day and green jelly roll cakes for St. Patrick’s Day in most bakeries.  I made a jelly roll cake once before: a Bûche de Noël for a high school French cooking project.  But it was so long ago that I pretty much forgot how to make one.  It seems like it would be complicated but it is actually so simple, especially after you have done it once and have the method down.  It is typically a sponge or genoise cake that is baked in a thin sheet and then filled with whipped cream or jam and rolled into a log, to then be sliced into indiviudal spiral rolls.  You can use the cake and filling of choice, as long as the cake is moist and flexible enough to roll without drying and cracking (although rolling the cake in a towel while it is still warm helps mold it into shape, and you may be able to get away with using other types of cakes baked in thin layers, as well.)

Earlier this year I was checking out at a grocery store and saw a red Valentine’s Day jelly roll in the checkout display.  Right then and there I started thinking of a green jelly roll cake made with natural {spinach} food dye, similar to the method that I used for my naturally-dyed rainbow cake.  Amidst the checkout chaos of paying for groceries with a 4- and an almost 2-year old , I started envisioning a naturally-dyed green jelly roll cake in the shape of a shamrock.

And voilà!  Here we are a few days before St. Patrick’s Day and I my brainstorm image has come to life.  You can enjoy your jelly roll in individual slices or arrange three slices per plate to make a festive St. Paddy’s shamrock.

I adapted a basic sponge cake recipe from The All New Joy of Cooking, a recipe that turns out to be pretty similar to Paula Deen’s jelly roll cake.  I strayed from the cookbook’s method and followed Cooking Light’s step-by-step instructions: How-To Roll a Jelly Roll Cake.  I found the same or similar method in many other recipes that I referenced, including Paula Deen’s.

I substituted spinach juice for half of the milk and I omitted the egg yolks to help achieve a truer green, both changes that you can ignore if you don’t wish to dye your cake green.  I added a bit of vanilla extract for flavor and used a basic vanilla whipped cream frosting for the filling.

And here’s one more reason to love jelly rolls {and a baking confession!}: I was using an old pan that didn’t lay flat in the oven once it got hot.  My mini-mid-baking crisis was checking on the cake a few minutes in to find that all of the batter had run to one side of the pan.  Fortunately, I was able to spread the cake out again with a spatula, even though parts of it were partially baked.  You will notice in some of the pictures that especially one corner of the sheet got pretty thoroughly cooked.  Even still, I was able to trim around the edges and salvage most of the cake to make almost a complete roll.