Jelly Roll Call

Friday, February 22, 2008

When I moved to an on-campus apartment in college and finally had a kitchen, my parents gave me The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, a wonderful basic cookbook that I still use regularly.  It’s got some leftover-from-the-fifties recipes (pickled shrimp in a crystalline ice bowl?!?), but for any ordinary food like pancakes or cream of mushroom soup or lasagna, it’s useful.  One of its best sections is the one on desserts, so when I realized that we were going to have too much jam left over this season, I went looking for a jelly roll recipe.  Jelly roll is sticky, but it is also soft and squishy and what my Dad used to make for us to eat with tea when I was a little girl. 

I used our “black and blue” jam--blackberries and blueberries we picked last summer.  The other local ingredients were maple sugar, honey (in the jam), and eggs. 

You can see a peek of the maple sugar and the egg yolks behind the bowl of lovely frothy egg whites.  This jelly roll also has flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla, and confectioners’ sugar, none of which I had local. 

It came out well, not as sweet as you might imagine, given all the different kinds of sugar!