New Year's Eve 2023 roll cake

Today I figured I'd get a head start on our New Year's dessert.  All I have energy for is a roll cake, but I thought I'd decorate it with the number 2024.  But, nothing is ever as simple as one thinks!

I printed out a sheet of numbers to trace onto the parchment and used the biggest font possible. It still looked smaller than I wanted and I planned to enlarge it in the copy machine, then promptly forgot about it.  I realized this too late, after I'd already piped the numbers!  

For the decorative slurry, I used Gemma Stafford's recipe. I colored it green, which my mother always said was the color of hope.  I hope for a better year next year, after 2023 took my mother.

I used a vanilla roll cake recipe from Martha Stewart and ran into a bit of trouble when I realized I was short on cake flour.  I had to substitute 1/4 cup of AP flour. I realized too late that I should have added 1/4 teaspoon additional baking powder, to help give it some lift. Next, I had trouble separating the eggs and maybe some yolk got into the whites because I also had trouble getting the meringue to form stiff peaks and look glossy.  I didn't want to overbeat the meringue, so I finally just went with what I had.  I'm sure it will be good enough.

When making a roll cake with a design, turning it out onto the tea towel or parchment is trickier because the half sheet is so hot and you have to flip it twice.  I always make such a mess of confectioners sugar!  I was hoping to cool it on parchment, but instead it ended up on the tea towel.  It cooled like that, and then I was too tired to make the filling.  I took it out, dusted another piece of parchment with confectioners sugar, then wrapped that in plastic wrap and all of it in foil and stuck it in the fridge overnight.  With all this handling the thin cake started to crack, and the number 2024 started looking smaller and smaller to me.  I decided to go to bed, because I feel a cold or god forbid Covid coming on. It figures for a year such as this to end on this note!

The next day when I unwrapped the cake to fill it, it cracked! And it didn't just crack, it actually came apart into 3 pieces.  This has never happened to me before!  Perhaps it was overbaked, because I found it to be a little dry.  But more likely, in spite of what they tell you, the cake needs to be filled and finished the same day. I went ahead and filled it anyway, pressed it together with my hands and wrapped it with plastic wrap for a few hours in the fridge.  With this, it held together and looked alright, and I was able to take it out to present it and it sliced easily.

The filling was a simple chocolate whipped cream filling. I used 1 cup of heavy cream, 2 tbsp cocoa powder, 2 tbsp confectioners' sugar, and 1/2 tsp vanilla; and whipped to stiff peaks. But, let's take note that this is a large roll, using a baker's half sheet.  I didn't have enough whipped cream to spread it as generously as I would have wanted.  When serving it I actually whipped up more cream to dish on the side. Serving it with strawberries on the side also helped make the taste more interesting, because the cake and the whipped cream filling were both kind of bland. Note to self, next time let's try a whipped chocolate ganache filling for this cake, or at the very least use 1.5 cups of whipping cream and increase the other ingredients accordingly.  Another idea to enhance the taste would be to spread the cake with raspberry or strawberry jam before adding the whipped cream filling.

Another change I would make is to pipe more numbers. The decoration looked rather scant, to be honest. I see that it would have looked more festive to have rows of "2024" going across the cake like stripes, or even actual stripes alternating with rows of "2024", or something more.  That's an idea for next time, because I'll definitely make more roll cakes. In spite of these snags the guys liked the cake and we enjoyed it after our traditional New Year's Eve home-made sushi dinner.

Goodbye to 2023, which turned out to be a bad year, and with hopes that 2024 will be better.