Rosey black tea cake roll

Basically, the cake is a chiffon cake flavoured with caramel and tea, then rolled up with whipped cream flavoured with rose water. So, for the cake itself:

Ingredients (for a normal flat baking tray):

• 4 eggs (large or medium, I used the larger ones in my mixed size box)
• flour 75g (The main difference between plain flour and cake flour is gluten percentage. I used about 1:3 corn starch/plain flour to approximate that.)
• 100g milk
• one earl gray teabag, one tbsp of Yorkshire black tea. (I meant to add rose flavour to the cream filling, so I used more plain black tea instead of all earl grey, so as to not introduce too many different kinds of flavours.)
• sugar (for meringue and for caramel). I am not entirely certain about how much now, I think about 20g for caramel and 30-40g for meringue this time? It can depend on your taste.
• sunflower oil 30-40g. (Using sunflower oil or other light taste veg oil. I find vegetable oil a bit too … savoury tasting to me. You can use butter, but chiffon cake with butter tends to be heavier and less crumbly than with sunflower oil.)
• One lemon, for optional lemon zest in the cake and lemon juice for making meringue.

Chiffon is a cake that’s solely raised by the meringue, no baking powder needed. So we first make a base batter (step 1-6), then we make meringue (7), then combine them (8), then bake (9).

1. Make caramel from sugar. Melt (the amount that you’d like) sugar in a little water and heat it on the stove, till the sugar turned light brown. I suggest using a little deep milk pan to do this. Take the pan off heat to prevent overheating and burning the caramel. The heat of the pan might cook it to a little darker.
2. When it is caramel colour like dark amber, add the cold milk to it, to stop heating. Be careful of possible splatter. Keep stirring, until the milk melts the caramel and it all turns into brown liquid.
3. Add tea bag and tea leaves. Brew it in the hot milk, or return it to stove to sit on the hot plate with the residue heat if the milk is not hot enough. (I have a really thick hot plate stove, thus the cautions regarding overheating above and using residue heat this step XD)
4. Separate eggs into yolks and whites into two mixing bowls.
5. For egg yolks, mix it with sunflower oil, like how you’d do mayonnaise. Mix until it’s even and nothing separates. Take out the teabag from the milk tea. Pour milk tea into the egg-oil mixture, and mix till it’s even. Add lemon zest.
6. Add flour in the egg-milktea-oil mixture. I find mixing a thicker batter then thinning it with more liquid not pleasant to do. Mixing all liquids then gradually adding flour seems more comfortable for me. So far, the base batter is done, then we move on to the meringue.
7. Add a little lemon juice to the egg whites. Lemon juice helps with the whipping, it doesn’t have much effect on taste. If there’s no lemon juice, use colourless vinegar is also fine. Whip the egg whites, until it forms soft peaks. Sugar in meringue gives its structural stability. The whipping can be briefly split into three stages: you start with egg white and lemon juice and whip, till it’s foamy but still looks eggy, then you add half of the sugar into it and go into stage 2 whipping. In stage 2, you whip till it looks white with big bubbles. Then you add most of the rest of the sugar and go into stage 3. In stage 3, you whip till the bubbles become smaller and the meringue looks smooth, glossy and silky. If it is not that glossy, add some more sugar a little by a little, and whip at low speed if you use an electric mixer. Do NOT overwhip. It should form soft peak, which means when you pull out the whisker, you can pull out a little peak with a curve that slightly drips down. If the meringue becomes blocky like icebergs, that is overwhipped. Overwhipped meringue could cause the cake to rise unevenly when baked, and collapse more during cooling (if I remember correctly, I saw youtube video doing experiments on that topic).
8. Now we add meringue to the base batter. Add in three batches. This helps with smoothing the texture and reduces the losing of the bubbles. First, add about 1/3 of the meringue into the batter. The batter should look somewhat runny and of a similar consistency to the meringue, so it should not be too hard to mix even. Use spatula to scoop the meringue and lightly drop the meringue on to the batter surface. Cross-slide on the meringue and batter, so it naturally sinks in a bit, and then lightly fold the meringue into batter, until it looks even. Second, add in another 1/3 meringue, and repeat the sliding and the folding. Then, add in the last 1/3 meringue, and repeat. It should get easier and easier to mix and fold, as the consistency gets more similar. The end results should have similar volume as the sum of the batter and the meringue.
9. Line a flat shallow tin tray with baking paper. Pour the mixture of step 8 gently onto it, and let it flow to fill in the corners of the tray. Use spatula to smooth the surface. Preheat the oven to around 160 degrees, then put in the tray. Bake till cooked. It was about 15-20min for me. Poke the cake with a knife or skewer and if it comes out clean, it is cooked.

Then we cool and pre-roll the cake. I have to confess that I still haven’t found out how to not let the cake stick so much to the baking paper during pre-roll, or prevent it from nearly cracking when I unroll to fill in cream. Alas.

1. Let the cake cool a little in the tray, then pull it out to cool on rack. Cover with another piece of baking paper (some recipes use tea towel to cover here, maybe it will help with non-sticking, idk), flip it, peel off the bottom (now top) baking paper. I think this is to let the moisture out a bit, otherwise it sticks even more during pre-roll unroll in my past experience.
2. When the cake cools to somewhat warm, not steaming hot, start pre-roll. Pre-roll is to shape the cake roll shape when it’s pliable, because cold cake cracks if you attempt to roll it. You can cover the top again with a piece of baking paper, so it has baking paper both on top and bottom, to make it easier when unrolling. Start with one end of the cake sheet, roll it gently, do not press it, let it curve naturally, until you reach the other end and now have a log.
3. Let the log cool to room temperature. During this time, we can make the cream filling.

I quite like rose flavoured whipped cream so I did it for this cake. The flavour is achieved by adding rose water to the cream during whipping. The method of introducing flavour with rose water can be applied to introduce other flavours, e.g., I quite like adding cherry brandy into the cream for my chocolate cake roll for yule log. I added extra rose bud flakes for decoration and texture, you can skip it if you don’t like chewy bits. Whipped cream ingredients:

• double cream
• sugar (to taste)
• rose water (to taste)
• 2 rose tea buds.

Steps:

1. flake the rose tea buds, i.e. tearing it to pieces by hands is fine. Add it to a mixing bowl, pour in rose water (about 1-2 bottle caps). I did this to soak the petals a bit so it won’t be too crispy cuz I think crispy rose petal is a bit weird … but on the other hand, soaking in the cream for overnight should do the moisturising too, so I’m not sure if this soaking is entirely necessary.
2. Pour into the mixing bowl cold cream. Cold cream is easier to whip.
3. Whip the cream, similarly to how you whip the meringue. Whip without sugar for a bit, add in first batch of sugar, whip till curding a little, add some more sugar, whip till stiff. You can taste the cream at this point for adjusting. Add more sugar, or add more rose water. If you do add, slowly mixing it in by hand, to prevent overwhipping. You can also just whip the cream and sugar without flavouring, then introduce flavouring here. It doesn’t matter much.
4. If the cake roll is not cool enough, store the whipped cream in the fridge. Warm cake will melt whipped cream.

Then when cake is about cooled, let’s roll XD

1. Gently unroll the rolled cake sheet. This step is where it is about the most risky for me. If you open too fast, it might crack or even break, and it probably will stick and sticking makes it break even more. Do it slowly and gently.
2. Pull out the baking paper if you covered the top surface. Be gentle. Put in the cream. Scoop it with spatula, lightly drop it to the surface, smooth it over evenly. Don’t put in too much, or it cracks when it’s rolled (that said, I almost always put in too much, so I always end up with one or two cracks. I just like the cream too much ..)
3. When cream is all smoothed over, roll the cake. Start from one end again, use the bottom baking paper to lift it and let it curl down. Lightly press it solid, but not too hard to break it. Roll it till the other end, then you have the log.
4. Chill the log in fridge for a couple of hours or overnight.

Done! Enjoy!

All that said, it would taste about the same if you do it as a normal cake instead of a cake roll. I find cake roll is better at making the cake more evenly paired cream, but if presentation really matters, it’s no harm to do it as a normal cake with cream topping to reduce risks. The method is similar, you just pour the cake batter into a lined round cake tin and it’s all done.