I have decided not to start any more posts with “should have “ or “planned to”. To paraphrase Gandalf, I post neither late nor early, I post precisely when I mean to. That said, I haven’t been baking much since we’ve been clearing out all the leftover cookies and candy from Christmas and New year, so here’s a post about the rolled Christmas cake I made.
I have made roll cakes a few times during the Christmas time and this year I decided to change up the usual chocolate buche de noel with a raspberry twist. I used a recipe from Home Cooking Adventure, and I will say up front that the cake I made does not look anywhere as good as the one on the website, and that is definitely from user error. It tasted fantastic but I wouldn’t want to serve it to anyone but my friends and family. Part of the issue is that there just wasn’t enough cake for my roll. Since I was using my cake roll pan for the roll cake I might have needed to double the cake amount as the cake came out very thin with the edges being crispy enough to be over-cooked.
Another problem was the assembly, as I needed to stop mid way through making the cake, so I got the cake cooked and rolled and the raspberry jam made but then I needed to tuck them into the fridge so that I could come back and make the filling and assemble it the next day. I I’m nor sure I followed the instructions completely when it came to putting the cake together, putting down the cream cheese frosting then the jam. I also don’t know if the consistency of the jam was wrong, it was too cooled, or there just wasn’t enough cake for the filling but the jam oozed out more than I had anticipated.
Finally, since we were having the cake along with a bunch of other snacks I didn’t want it to be too heavy and decided to just do a dusting of powdered sugar instead of the white chocolate ganache. I also ended up not adding whole raspberries to the cake because we didn’t have enough raspberries to both make the jam and fill the cake without going out into the cold to get more, and I was busy enough just cooking.
Despite it not being a looker the cake still tasted great. The cake would have been better if there was more of it but it was still light and went well with the cream cheese frosting. The raspberry jam was tart enough that it kept the cream cheese frosting from getting overwhelming but wasn’t so sour that it was unpleasant.
If the cake sounds good then you can find the recipe below (please give it a try, the picture on the blog gives it much better justice than my own): https://www.homecookingadventure.com/christmas-raspberry-cake-roll
