Jelly roll cakes look so fun, but they make me nervous because there’s quite a few things that can go wrong. I don’t know if it’s just self punishment or what, but I decided to do a whole month of jelly roll cakes so here goes….

The cake itself was easy to make and one difference from this recipe and others is that you use the whole egg rather than whipping the egg whites and folding them into the batter. Once you’ve got everything mixed you’ll pour that onto a lined 9×13 jelly roll pan and bake. Mine ended up baking for about 13 minutes but in hindsight I think it might have needed another minute or two.

Now for the fun part… sprinkle 1/4 cup of powdered sugar on a tea towel and you’ll flip the cake out onto it and then roll it while it’s still warm. My first struggle was when to actually try and flip the cake out. Do I let it cool a little or just go for it? I kept second guessing myself and ended up letting it cool for a few minutes in the pan before trying to flip it out. I also wasn’t sure how to flip it out onto the tea towel without risking it cracking. I’m not even sure what I ended up doing but I did it quickly and hoped for the best. It did work out and I peeled the parchment paper off easily and rolled it up.

While it was cooling I went ahead and mixed together the filling and that was super easy. Just mix powdered sugar, softened butter and cream cheese and you’re done.

I unrolled my cake and already saw some significant cracks so that wasn’t encouraging. But I’m not a quitter (or at least not when it involves food) so I just kept going and figured even if it looked bad it would still taste good. I added a nice layer of the filling, topped with blueberries, and then attempted to roll it back up. Emphasis on the word “attempt.” It was pretty awful and I think 1/4 of the cake stuck to the tea towel. I did manage to get it back into a round shape somehow and sprinkled more powdered sugar to at least cover up the misshapen mass a little.

Taste wise it was okay, but if I hadn’t put the lemon juice in there myself I wouldn’t have known it was supposed to be lemon. The blueberries were fun, but my filling was a little thick since my cake was mostly nonexistent. I think if I made this again I’d use lemon zest to create a more lemony flavor and obviously figure out how to not mess up the cake portion.

Baking Ease	10
Time Spent	9
Taste	10
Visual	9

Recipe Used: Butter With a Side of Bread