A roll cake is a bit more difficult to make than a traditional molded cake. Of course, rolling up the cake is an extra step. But it is really not difficult, so don't be intimidated with it. If you follow our steps it will work out perfectly. Promised! And of course a pumpkin pecan rollcake fits perfectly to autumn and winter. So why wouldn't you choose this for your Christmas dessert? You will not be disappointed!

How to make a pumpkin pecan rollcake

A roll cake looks incredibly professional. And yet it is quite easy to make. Everybody can make it. Just follow our advice!

Making the dough

The dough really is the easy part of making the cake. And the best thing is, it doesn't need to bake long. Which is certainly a plus in times of rising energy prices.

Preparing the pumpkin

The biggest job is cutting the pumpkin into pieces. You only need 60 grams, that is really not much. So buy a small pumpkin. This also means that we will have quite some leftover pumpkin. But that never is a problem. We will give you some nice ideas on what to make with it at the bottom of the article.

A pumpkin is also not the easiest vegetable to manipulate. I prefer to work with a Hokkaido. I usually cut the bottom off first so that it stands firm. Then I cut about a third off and remove the seeds. From the smaller third I then remove the skin and cut the flesh into cubes.

The pumpkin pieces then go into the food processor together with the pecans. We grind them well.

I wrap the surplus of the pumpkin in cling film and that then goes in the fridge for the next days. More tips for tasty pumpkin recipes can be found at the bottom of this article.

Combining the ingredients into a dough

The dough is very easy to make. Beat the eggs until fluffy. Then we gradually add the other ingredients: the ground pumpkin and pecans, the flour and the baking powder, and finally the cinnamon powder. Now mix everything well together and there we are with the dough.

Baking the dough

The special thing about a roll cake is that we do not bake the dough in a (spring) mold, but on the baking tray. This is also more energy efficient because the baking time is much shorter. In times of energy crisis and high gas and electricity prices, that might be an extra motivation to try a roll cake.

We do not take a deep baking tray, but one with a sloping edge. That is much easier to handle, and to take the cake out afterwards.

Although we work with baking paper, we still grease the baking tray. As a result, the baking paper sticks well to the baking tray. This is necessary to ensure that the dough is evenly distributed afterwards.

We also grease the baking paper again. We want to be able to take the cake off later without it breaking into pieces because it sticks to it.

So now we have baking sheet, butter, baking paper, butter. What's still missing? Yes, the dough. We pour this from the batter bowl into the baking tray. And then we distribute this nicely over the entire baking sheet.

Then we transfer everything into the preheated oven at 180°C for 15 minutes. Indeed, because of the large surface we only need fifteen minutes of baking time here before taking it out of the oven.

Rolling the cake, and give it a rest

Once the cake is out of the oven, let it cool down for five minutes. Then we remove it from the baking tray with the baking paper. Feel free to let everything cool down a bit more.

Now we put a clean kitchen towel on top of the cake and carefully flip it upside down. Now the towel is at the bottom side and the baking paper at the top. That is what we need, because we now want to carefully remove the baking paper. After that we carefully roll up the cake in the towel, and let it cool completely and settle. We now have a roll cake without filling.

The filling for the cake

To make the filling for this pumpkin pecan rollcake, we first melt the butter in a small pan. Then we add the granulated sugar. Give it time to melt while stirring gently.

When the sugar has melted, you can also mix in the cream cheese and a tablespoon of lemon juice. Remove the pan from the heat and let the filling cool down to lukewarm.

Meanwhile, we can roll out the roll cake again. With the spatula we then divide the filling over the roll cake. And then we can roll up the cake again. Now there is one more step to complete the final product.

For this we need cling film. We wrap the pumpkin pecan rollcake in it and then place it in the fridge until shortly before serving it. This way it becomes firm and you can cut nice pieces.

More surprising.rollcake

Once you have made this pumpkin pecan rollcake once, you will love to make rollcakes over and over again. But maybe you do not want to make the same recipe all the time. So we did some research for other roll cake recipes that you might love to make:

A rollcake is often also described as a cake roll, roll cake or even Swiss roll. Where this name originates from is not really known. But you will find it in many countries all over the world. Read all about it in the Wikipedia article on Swiss roll.

More surprising.pumpkin

We promised already a few times to give you some more inspiration to use your leftover pumpkin. We really have a lot of them on surprising.recipes. So here are some great ideas:

If you speak Dutch, you can find the Dutch version of this recipe on gerechtenweb.blog.