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Dessert

Jelly Roll

A rolled cake made from eggs, flour, sugar, milk, baking powder, and jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Jelly Roll

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs and mix in the sugar.

  2. Add the flour, milk, and baking powder; mix until smooth.

  3. Spread the batter very thinly in the pans.

Bake and roll

  1. Bake until lightly golden, but do not overbake.

  2. If the edges are hard, trim them with a sharp knife before rolling.

  3. While hot, spread jelly over the cake, roll it up, and wrap in napkins to maintain shape.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Whipped eggs trap air and provide the structure that holds the thin sponge together.
All-purpose flour
Flour forms the gluten and starch network that gives the cake its body for rolling.
Sugar
Sugar sweetens the sponge and helps it brown lightly and stay tender.
Baking powder
Baking powder releases gas in the oven, helping the thin batter rise and stay light.

The step that matters

Rolling while hot. Baked sponge is pliable only while warm; once it cools, the starches set and the cake cracks when rolled. Rolling it hot with the jelly, wrapped in napkins, lets it set in a curl.

“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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