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Dessert

Jelly Roll

A sweet cake made from a thin batter of flour, sugar, eggs, and baking powder, baked and rolled with jelly filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Jelly Roll

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the batter

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and baking powder.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs until frothy.

  4. Add the beaten eggs to the dry ingredients and mix well.

  5. Add flavoring and enough water to achieve a thin dough consistency.

  6. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan and spread evenly.

Bake and fill

  1. Bake for about 20-25 minutes or until golden brown.

  2. Let cool, then roll with your favorite jelly filling.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten eggs trap air and provide structure for the light, rollable sponge.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and stay tender.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and stays light.

The step that matters

Let cool, then roll. A thin sponge baked until golden is still warm and fragile. Rolling it before it cools fully can crack it, so it should be cooled before the filling is rolled in.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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