Pumpkin Roulade with Ginger Buttercream
- By Katie Roche
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- 02 Mar, 2020
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"What a great day to roll cake!"...is not at all what Dan said to me when I told him we were making this yesterday. This is because he, along with a lot of other people apparently, fervently believes that Sunday afternoons are for napping but knows that if I am in any way required to do something delicate with the shape or appearance of a food I am making, I will be calling his name plaintively (or sometimes hysterically) from the kitchen for either actual help or moral support. Things like rolling cake, braiding bread dough, and leveling cake are not my fortes. So he was not thrilled to know his nap would likely be interrupted by this.
ItemQuest: mostly just pumpkin in March, LOL. I will never understand why pumpkin isn't with the rest of the canned vegetables and fruit but it isn't and now that this information is cemented in my brain, it doesn't take me forever to find anymore. Thankfully. We also went to TJ's so as not to pay $4 each for mascarpone cheese. And look! I got brown eggs for the first time ever!!! I did that because they were the only ones TJ's had in XL, and Ina's recipes always call for XL eggs. Might seem finnicky to stick to that but I'm not trying to end up with dry baked goods because my egg/flour ratio wasn't precise. I'm nothing if not an excellent follower of directions.
ItemQuest: mostly just pumpkin in March, LOL. I will never understand why pumpkin isn't with the rest of the canned vegetables and fruit but it isn't and now that this information is cemented in my brain, it doesn't take me forever to find anymore. Thankfully. We also went to TJ's so as not to pay $4 each for mascarpone cheese. And look! I got brown eggs for the first time ever!!! I did that because they were the only ones TJ's had in XL, and Ina's recipes always call for XL eggs. Might seem finnicky to stick to that but I'm not trying to end up with dry baked goods because my egg/flour ratio wasn't precise. I'm nothing if not an excellent follower of directions.
First, we sift! I love sifting!!! Also pictured here: a tape measure, because I was checking the exact dimensions of my pan. Ina always calls for these weirdly-dimensioned pans that are not standard and are usually 1-2 inches off of what most people would have in their kitchen. Like, 10x12 for casseroles and stuff like that. It's some real rich-lady-hipster energy, honestly, as EVERYONE knows it's 9x13 for casseroles and, you know, whatever else is normal for loaf pans and sheet pans and all that, and using weirdly dimensioned pans doesn't make you cool, it just makes you obnoxious. Anyway, whatever her dimensions are here, just use a sheet pan. And, this is VERY IMPORTANT!!! - you do actually need to grease, parchment, then grease and flour this sheet pan. This cake is very thin, and you're not frosting it, so it is pretty unforgiving as far as salvaging from pan-sticking goes. Take proper precautions.
Contents of KitchenAid bowl at this point are eggs, sugar, and pumpkin. No creaming of butter! Yay! This cake also doesn't have oil! The amount of batter produced is also quite small since it's meant to be rolled and not be giant, and I love that. I mixed in the flour mixture on low and finished incorporating with a spatula.
'Twas at this point that I considered the easy part of this operation complete. I did not even have a lengthy bake time to contemplate the future: this cake only bakes for 10 minutes and it's very easy to tell when it's done. Love that about it.
Enter my favorite kitchen towel for baking. A friend of mine got this for me at a cooking store in Alaska, and it's funny for the obvious reason, but also because when I used to work at a Catholic school, there was this one EXCESSIVELY grouchy lady who would go to Mass every day and when they would be doing the thing where they say "for ______, we pray to the Lord, Lord hear our prayer" she would always yell SO LOUDLY: "LARD, hear our prayer." And she always said "LARD" like that and I had to suppress giggles from the piano because it would have been unprofessional and irreverent to laugh. But if you call Jesus "LARD" in church, people might laugh, reverent or not. It's hilarious and you know it.
So WITHOUT PANICKING, you have to invert the sheet pan of cake quickly and adeptly onto a kitchen towel dusted with powdered sugar (do that instead of flour, for deliciousness reasons) and you have to roll it WHILE IT IS STILL WARM and make a little baby cake burrito like this. And then she has to cool completely. I guess you're essentially molding the cake and making it amenable to being rolled while it is still pliable from being warm. Dan and I made this probably five or six years ago and I distinctly remember this part terrifying me and me asking him to do it. I would like to announce that I did this entirely by myself this time, and only needed him to stand behind me and say supportive things, which he did. I successfully made a cake burrito. (That actually sounds like a thing we should try, no? Filled with like, animal crackers tossed in rainbow chip frosting? There's something there, I know it.)
Instead of getting my KitchenAid bowl dirty AGAIN (which I like to avoid because Dan says we should hand-wash it and I am lazy), I used my hand mixer to beat the mascarpone, powdered sugar, and heavy cream. Then I stirred in the minced crystallized ginger. I would like to take this moment to point out that this is not, in fact, buttercream as it has no butter. But anyway. Ready to roll - literally.
Honestly, doesn't this look so beautiful and delicious??? Spreading it was kind of hard because it kept sticking to the spatula but whatever, I made it work. I also may have prolonged the process in order to procrastinate on the part where I had to roll it back up but wouldn't you? Rolling cake. I mean. Ridiculous.
This is a really proud moment for me!!! Look at this majesty!!! Look at that perfect swirl! The filling isn't too thick in any one part and I didn't break the cake at ALL whilst rolling it! I truly looked this recipe in the eye and became the boss of it. The only drawback of this triumph was the amount of powdered sugar EVERYWHERE as it is, to rip off Dmetri Martin, the herpes of baking supplies. I also do not own an appropriately fancy serving platter for this, so I used the cutting board we still own from Dan's bachelor days. At first I thought this cutting board was the one we emergency-purchased at Fred Meyer in Soldotna that one time we forgot to bring our Board of Death, TM for gutting fish on the river. They look very similar. No worries, no fish were gutted on this board, its original intent was, I suppose, a surface on which to make PB&Js or whatever bachelors buy cutting boards for. Somehow I don't think they purchase them to roll and serve cakes upon.
In order to present that even and beautiful log, I got to hack the ends off and taste it. I see this as a major pro to this recipe - built in and purposeful taste-testing opportunity, unlike actual cake where you just kind of have to pray it turned out well and don't actually know until you're eating it along with everyone else. This cake, though I was hesitant about rolling, was pretty simple when it came down to it, and VERY delicious. When I made it a few years ago, I was still working through some food aversions and did not enjoy the crystallized ginger chunks in the filling but I find them to be a pleasant bit of texture now. I normally would not like a very sponge-y cake, but that light texture combined with the cool and creamy mascarpone filling was EXCELLENT. One other significant pro to this recipe other than the ones I've already mentioned is that you could definitely prepare the filling and the cake well-ahead of a dinner party and then fill, roll, and dust with powdered sugar (or as my friend Chris has taught his child to call it, "sugy-sug") when it's time for dessert. I find that people often enjoy getting to witness dessert-assembly, and this would allow you to do the majority of the work ahead of time!
The one aversion people expressed to me about this was that they did not appreciate being served pumpkin in the almost-spring time. I will never understand this. If something is delicious, it just is. Peppermint tastes good in the summer. Peach cobbler tastes good in January. (If you can find peaches to make it, that is.) Like I get the concept of seasonal food being good because ingredients are fresh but I just cannot get on board with a refusal to eat something that is perfectly fine because it's "not the right time of year". Nevertheless, it was only rejected by a few as a I sat on the benches outside the hockey rink after a late game for my team, hacking off slices of pumpkin roll for sweaty passersby. As I did this, I hummed "we built this city...we built this city on PUMPKIN ROLLLL". MY only aversions to this are: 1) rolling IS a little nerve-wracking and 2) Ina's intro (isn't that usually the worst part of her recipes?) in which she describes this as something she came up with in an attempt to make something more interesting for Thanksgiving than a standard pumpkin pie. Let me clear this up for you, Ina: pumpkin pie does not need or want your help. I give thanks for this pumpkin roll you've created, but I would 100% pass it on a Thanksgiving table for a slice of pumpkin pie, as is meet and proper, so don't be like that. Anyway, make this pumpkin roll, just not to try to one-up Thanksgiving dishes that don't need one-upping, and enjoy.
The one aversion people expressed to me about this was that they did not appreciate being served pumpkin in the almost-spring time. I will never understand this. If something is delicious, it just is. Peppermint tastes good in the summer. Peach cobbler tastes good in January. (If you can find peaches to make it, that is.) Like I get the concept of seasonal food being good because ingredients are fresh but I just cannot get on board with a refusal to eat something that is perfectly fine because it's "not the right time of year". Nevertheless, it was only rejected by a few as a I sat on the benches outside the hockey rink after a late game for my team, hacking off slices of pumpkin roll for sweaty passersby. As I did this, I hummed "we built this city...we built this city on PUMPKIN ROLLLL". MY only aversions to this are: 1) rolling IS a little nerve-wracking and 2) Ina's intro (isn't that usually the worst part of her recipes?) in which she describes this as something she came up with in an attempt to make something more interesting for Thanksgiving than a standard pumpkin pie. Let me clear this up for you, Ina: pumpkin pie does not need or want your help. I give thanks for this pumpkin roll you've created, but I would 100% pass it on a Thanksgiving table for a slice of pumpkin pie, as is meet and proper, so don't be like that. Anyway, make this pumpkin roll, just not to try to one-up Thanksgiving dishes that don't need one-upping, and enjoy.
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!