Banana roll cake

 

This is my sons favorite, and one of my favorite cakes to eat and make! It’s delicious and pretty too, yet all it takes is decorative assembly of a simple jelly roll, vanilla butter cream, bananas and whipped cream on the top. The recipe is used in many places, so I cannot give credit to one particular person, or site, and it varies a bit. Some people put some eggs in the filling, I don’t, and so on.
It’s a crowd pleaser, so I made it this w/e for a christening I was attending! The ceremony was beautiful, and baby is sooooooooo cute! Congratulations to my cousin and his wife again!

I had a great time with family and friends, and I totally forgot to take pictures of the cake in it’s final state, or cut up. I did take pictures of the process, and luckily, just for now, I have these old pictures, a little bad in quality, and with different jelly, but nonetheless you can get the idea of how pretty it is, and what it looks like when it’s sliced.
First you need to make a jelly roll, and I always make it the same way, the way my late mother in law taught me.



Never fail jelly roll...

For the jelly roll:

6 eggs
6 Tbsp of AP flour
6 Tbsp of sugar
½ Tsp of baking powder

Mix the egg whites with sugar until stiff, then add the yolks, one by one, then flour mixed with baking power. Bake in a jelly roll pan lined with parchment paper, @ 385 F until lightly golden. Transfer onto damp kitchen towel, along with the parchment paper, and roll it up. Let it cool down completely, unroll it, and as you do it peel off the parchment paper, spread your favorite jam or jelly on (not too much, you don’t want it oozing out), and then cut it up into slices.

Now, you make the vanilla butter cream. You’ll need:

1 liter milk
2 packages Dr.Oetker (or some other kind) vanilla pudding
7 Tbsp of finest flour
6 Tbsp of sugar
2 ½ stick of unsalted butter or margarine
Powdered sugar to taste
4-5 bananas

Alternative fillingInstead of vanilla pudding use 5 Tbsp of corn starch and some vanilla extract, and instead of 7, use 5 Tbsp of flour.

Mix all the dry ingredients with some milk (that you take from 1 liter), and put the rest of the milk to boil. Make sure you beat the mixture with the mixer to ensure there are no lumps. Add the mixture to boiling milk, stir for a minute, don’t let it burn, and then transfer to a bowl and cool down completely. When cool, add the butter cut into slices, and as much powdered sugar as you like, adding it little by little until sweet enough o taste. I don’t like it too sweet…

Now, to assemble the cake. Place some jelly roll slices on the bottom of the spring form pan (I did it directly on the plate this time) to create a cake layer. Then put jelly roll slices around the spring form pan, and as you do this you can start adding the cream, because the slices won’t stick to the form.

So, you need to fill half of the cream, then you place bananas in circle, cutting them appropriately to fit them and bending them a little if needed to make the nice circles. In the middle you can put a little piece of banana. Do this fairly quickly, you don’t want the bananas to turn brown, and then put the remainder of the cream on top of bananas. Top with whipped cream.

Once they are stuck in all that cream, they won’t brown, and will be fresh when you cut the cake the next day. I say the next day because this cake is the best next day, as bananas sort of release their flavor, and it smells so good, mhmmmmm, yummy! Enjoy!

Old photo of same cake with plum jam...


Here's what else we were doing these days --- loving some cup cakes :))))  http://cafechocolada.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-04-24T21%3A47%3A00-04%3A00&max-results=4