St. Patrick's Day 2025 Chocolate Roll Cake
I'm always busy in the kitchen - too much so for my taste - but with having to shop and cook dinner so often, and clean up afterwards, I haven't done much baking aside from regularly baking bagels, and the odd banana muffins or olive bread. So it was that much more fun to spend a few hours in the kitchen recalling my skills, using my equipment, and trying a new recipe to make something delicious and pretty.
St. Patrick's day is one of those little holidays we enjoy celebrating because it breaks up the routine, is festive, and is an excuse to decorate and eat something different. This year we went with simple cube steaks with mushrooms and onions, colcannon, and my dessert.
I decided to make a roll cake with shamrock decorations. I used this recipe from Haniela's. I've seen her amazing cookie decorating videos, but had never made one of her recipes. Honestly I chose it because it came with a downloadable PDF for the shamrock decorations.
I made the batter for the shamrock decorations and colored it with two drops of Americolor in "Leaf", a beautiful basic green color. The recipe says to thin the batter as necessary with half to one tablespoon water. I did add about 3/4 of a half-tablespoon measure, and the batter seemed to flow nicely. I put it in a piping bag with a size 2 tip. But then when I went to pipe it, it was too thick and my hand quickly got tired. I decided to only pipe shamrocks in the middle of the cake and not go all the way to the edges. I don't even know if I would have had enough batter, had I tried to fill the entire cake with shamrocks. So, next time I would use at least a full half-tablespoon of water for this.
I didn't add the vanilla or almond extract to the cake batter. The description on the blog entry tells you when to add them, as I saw later, but it's not on the directions of the printed recipe. Although honestly the cake didn't seem to need them. I was surprised by the number of eggs (5 eggs plus one yolk), but maybe because of that the cake yielded enough batter to make a sturdy sponge. It baked up in about 11 minutes, and with my oven I could probably have taken it out after 10 minutes. Had I let it bake the full 15 minutes it would have been super dry.
When rolling the cake I followed Haniela's instructions to invert it onto was paper. She didn't say to put confectioner's sugar on it, and I figured it would only be on for a couple of minutes. But next time, I'd definitely coat it with the sugar, because even in that short time it stuck to the cake and took off a layer of cake. I rolled it up in a tea towel covered with sugar, and let it cool a relatively short time, and finished cooling it in the refrigerator because I had to go out and was short on time.
When I unrolled the cake from the towel, a lot of confectioner's sugar had clung to the cake, making it whitish. In spite of this, I don't know if I'd use cocoa powder on a tea towel for this cake, because it would smudge the shamrocks and take away from them. I had to brush pretty hard with a pastry brush to remove most of the white from the confectioner's sugar, but it still had a whitish look. It was still pretty though.
For the filling, I went with a simple whipped cream. I whipped 1.5 cups of heavy cream with .5 cup of confectioner's sugar and 1 teaspoon of vanilla for 2-3 minutes. It's critical to not overwhip and a mistake I tend to make, but I was able to stop in time. I filled the cake in a hurry, and I went a bit overboard with whipped cream towards the inside of the roll. I realized this when I cut it. It would have been better distributed had I put more towards the outside of the roll. Not the edges, but the long outside.
When cutting the cake I had to be careful because it was hard to cut through the shamrocks.
We served this cake with strawberries and raspberries. It was so good! I'm glad I didn't do a filling with mascarpone or cream cheese or mint or chocolate, all of which I considered. But R* wanted simple, and he was right.
I will make this recipe again!
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