Gingerbread Roll Cake

Hello friends! Happiest of pre-Thanksgivings to you (of the American variety, that is)!

For the past few years I’ve done the “Thanksgiving Dessert Bonanza” here at n00bcakes, but this year, for the first time in a long time, my Thanksgiving is not being held in my home state of Georgia. Instead, it’s being held in Virginia, the home of my brother and new sister-in-law. While this is awesome (I love visiting them) it also means that my baking time is drastically shorter, and that I’m fighting with a lot more people over the oven.

Suffice it to say, this year’s Thanksgiving Dessert Bonanza has been shortened to a single recipe: the Gingerbread Roll Cake.

Not pretty…but pretty tasty!

I have considerable mixed feeling about this recipe, which I have now made twice.

The good news is that it’s a genuinely tasty dessert, and it throws some great variety into what can sometimes be a pretty cookie-cutter variety of Thanksgiving (or other holiday) desserts. Not only is it a fancy roll-em-up cake, but it also has dominant flavors that are less common: ginger cinnamon. Sure, you get a tablespoon of them here and there in your pumpkin pies, but it’s not often that they’re the star of their own show.

The bad news is that doggone it if I have a hard time (1) making these look good and (2) getting the texture of the cake right! The process of making this cake isn’t too crazy: you have an egg yolk/molasses mixture, a meringue mixture, and your dry ingredient mixture. You fold them all together and bake them in a jelly roll pan. Once baked, you roll the cake up in a tea towel so it will cool in a spiral shape. Then you unroll it, add filling, and re-roll. Pretty simple, yeah?

Dry Ingredients

Here’s the problem: you have a lot of ingredients to fold together, and all that folding always makes the cake go a little flatter than I think it’s supposed to. The cake keeps turning out a little dense and, while not hard, just stiffer than I’d like. And what’s annoying is after each step that requires folding the recipe has the stones to remind you to “be careful” when folding in the ingredients. Look man, sometimes I might be an impatient baker, but I’m not a magician! Three meringued egg whites cannot compensate for an additional 2-cup wet mixture and an additional 1-cup dry mixture! Being “careful” is not something that’s going to keep this batter from deflating! Thanks for the pro tip, HOSS.

/grump

…But let me reiterate: the cake is very good. I simply can’t seem to get the batter as light as it’s supposed to be; despite my best efforts the cake always ends up dense. Anybody have some good folding tips for me?

Sadly deflated batter.

Anyway, aside from the annoyance with all the darn folding, the other issue is the prettiness; I get the feeling that’s the sort of thing that comes with practice, though. Once I get the density worked out I think it’ll probably be easier to spread, and thus bake evenly as opposed to being thicker in some areas and thinner in others.

My first try didn’t actually look too bad when sliced up. Check it out:

Not bad lookin’

This first try I had to make in a smaller pan, so you can see that the cake itself is thicker than the one above. Still, it’s slices turned out more uniform and the spiral was clear. My second attempt – the one today – was a little more anemic.

Anyway, I know it sounds like I’m giving this cake a lot of flack, but that’s mainly due to my frustration at not being able to do it proper justice from an implementation perspective. Damn and blast my untalented baking skills!

However, if you have gingerbread and cinnamon lovers in your house, I highly recommend this recipe – it’s a little time-consuming, what with the mixing of separate yolk, egg white, dry ingredient, and then whipped cream mixtures, but the flavor (and if you do it right, the presentation) is wonderful!

I wish everybody the best Thanksgiving – enjoy some family, friends, and good, good food!