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Dessert

Rolled Jelly Cake

A rolled cake made from an egg, sugar, flour batter, baked and topped with jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Rolled Jelly Cake

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.

Make the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, combine the beaten eggs, powdered sugar, and flour. Stir well.

  3. Add the cream of tartar and the dissolved baking soda. Mix until smooth.

  4. Pour the batter into two greased shallow pans and bake until golden.

Roll and finish

  1. Once baked, turn the cakes onto greased paper, bottom side up.

  2. Spread jelly evenly over the surface of the cake.

  3. Roll the cake up quickly, keeping the paper around it until cool.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Egg and flour 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 give the thin sponge its structure and lift.
All-purpose flour
Flour sets the batter's structure as the cake bakes, giving it a body that holds together.
Powdered sugar
Sugar sweetens the batter and helps it brown as it bakes.
Cream of tartar
Its acidity stabilizes the whipped egg foam and works with the baking soda to aid rising.
Baking soda
Reacting with the acidic cream of tartar produces gas that helps the cake rise.
Jelly
Jelly adds sweetness and moisture to the cake layer and forms the filling inside the roll.

The step that matters

Rolling the warm cake. The cake must be rolled while still warm and pliable, with the paper around it, so it bends without cracking. Once it cools fully it becomes brittle and the surface splits.

“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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