Swiss Roll/Jam Roll

Jam roll always reminds me of the summer vacations while we were still at school -a long two month hiatus in Kerala along with my cousins. There was a routine established for the four of us and the most important of it all being the 5 pm wait on our balcony for my aunt to get back from work - for pouncing on the goodies in her bag. She never failed us. 

Jam Roll was my favorite, it always intrigued me. Sometimes I would just bite into it hungrily and sometimes I took the time to unroll it lick away the delicious mixed fruit jam and then dig on the cake. The 'little me' never would have imagined that she would actually be making jam roll one day.

The idea of trying out something like this popped up when we brought orange marmalade. I was tasting it for the very first time and it did not fascinate me much. I had a bottle full of it and did not absolutely want it to rot away. That is when my hubby told me why not try a Swiss roll? I was clueless how this was done. Yet, I decided to try out on a weekend as we were expecting a few guests. I baked the cake for the roll but it was adamant and refused to roll, cracking up when I tried to roll it.  I could not let it go waste. So I decided to sandwich the marmalade between two slices of cake cut into circles and dust it with powdered sugar. It tasted good but the cake had turned out a little harder making the rolling difficult. I decided to research on this a bit more and this time it turned out the way just I had wanted it to.

Honestly, making a jam roll is not complicated as it looks. Just a little bit of patience and there you are.

Ingredients

For the sponge cake-

Self raising flour/Maida - 1 cup

Powdered sugar - 1 cup (3/4 goes into the cake and the rest for dusting)

Eggs - 4 separated

Vegetable oil or butter - 2 tbsp

Vanilla essence - 1 tsp

Baking powder - 1/2 tsp

Marmalade/ Jam/ Cream - flavor of your choice

Preparation

1. Sift the flour and baking sugar and keep aside.
2. Separate the egg yolk and white. Whisk the egg white along with a little sugar using a hand blender or electric blender for 7-8 minutes so that it becomes thick.
3. Add the vanilla essence into the egg yolk and mix it well. 
4. Into this, add 3/4 cup of the powdered sugar and the egg white. Fold in gently using a spoon or spatula in order to avoid air bubbles.
5.  Add the sifter flour, fold in the mixture well and finish off with the vegetable oil.
6. The cake mix is now ready to go into your oven.
7. Make sure that you pre - heat your oven at 180 degree for 15 minutes. Grease a square baking tray, in case you do not have that, you can use your roasting tray as well. Pour the mix into this and make sure it is evenly spread across.
8. Place in the oven for 10 - 15 minutes. Keep checking to avoid overcooking or browning of the cake.  

9. 

   Roll the sponge cake while hot along with the parchment paper

   Remove it from the oven once done and invert on top of a parchment paper which has been sprinkled with powdered sugar.( In case, the cake is too thick and you want your rolls to be thinner, you may just slice through the center)             Sprinkling of sugar is important else your cake may stick to the paper.
10. While still hot, roll the cake along with the parchment paper till the fag end. Tie up the ends to retain the shape and leave it to cool.

11. Once it has cooled down, unroll it spread the jam or marmalade evenly over the entire length and a little thinner towards the sides as the excess may pop out as we roll. Dust the roll with powdered sugar.Roll it back and cut out the rolls into thickness of your choice

Cut off the ends of the roll where the excess jam has spilled over

Your Jam Roll is ready to be served. Once a while instead of just making a sponge cake, you can layer it with jam and roll it - impressing everyone around you.