Chocolate Dobos Torte Rolls

Hello! For this blog post I have chosen to make "Chocolate (Dobos Torte) Rolls" from my book, Petite Sweets. 

I made these on a day when I was bored and wanted to make something easy. Based on the amount of ingredients and how simple the final product looked in the book, I thought it would be something I could whip up really quick and enjoy. Unfortunately, things definitely did not turn out the way I had planned. This probably turned out to be one of the harder recipes I made.

Just so you know what I had planned on eating at the end of the day, here's an image from my book:

Chocolate (Dobos Torte) Rolls from Petite Sweets (Ojakangas 30)

Looks good, right? Now take a look at the ingredients:

Cake:

• 2 large eggs, separated
• ½ cup powdered sugar
• ¼ cup all-purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons milk 

Chocolate Filling:

• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, soft

These are all common baking items so of course I already had all of them in the pantry and fridge ready to go. To start, I turned on the oven to 375°F. Then, in an electric mixer, I beat the egg yolks (that I had already separated) and powdered sugar. Once the mixture was thick, I "beat in the flour and milk until [the] batter [was] smooth" (Ojakangas 31). Once completed, I folded the mixture into a bowl with beaten egg whites. 
When everything was smooth and folded together, I spread the batter evenly over the parchment paper (Ojakangas 31) that I had already laid out. 

I placed the batter in the oven for 5-6 minutes. 

I wish I had mixed the egg more so that it didn't show as much in the final product, but it was edible, so I continued on with the directions. 
Or, I would have, if I had actually been able to peel the cake away from the parchment paper. Me, being the bad reader that I am, totally skipped over the directions which clearly stated, "Coat [the parchment paper] with nonstick spray and dust lightly with flour" (Ojakangas 31). 

I love having to do everything all over again. 

So, after throwing out my first miserable attempt at these chocolate rolls, I started my second batch. 
I repeated the whole process, this time making sure to mix the batter well instead of just folding the ingredients together in the last part. Oh, and I also sprayed the paper with nonstick spray. 

When evenly dispersed on the parchment paper, this batter clearly had less egg whites that were unbeaten compared to the last one. But, of course, one mistake was not enough for me. I had to be an unbalanced klutz and therefore, I accidentally made my batter run all over the baking sheet as I was traveling to the oven, so it wasn't as proportionate as I would've liked. This disaster resulted in... 

Many, many uneven spots and burning. The bottom of the cake was fluffier, which I think was how the whole product was supposed to be, and the top part barely had any batter so, with the extensive time in the oven, it burned. 

But I wasn't about to throw away this disaster yet. I took my spatula and cut out all the burned parts. Then I poked at each side of the paper slightly, and got it to separate. Now I was one step further than I had gotten last time. 

Since the cake part was finished, I started on the chocolate filling. This was the simple part. I placed a bowl on top of a pot of boiling water and filled it with the butter and chocolate chips. I stirred the two together and continued to do so until they were melted together. 
With both the cake and filling done, I started to spread the chocolate onto the cake. I didn't think ahead, though, and ended up spreading it on the whole thing. This didn't work out because, since I cut out the burned part, when I finished off the recipe by rolling the cake, some of the chocolate part wasn't covered by cake, as you can see below. 

Obviously, the end product looks nothing like the picture in the book. It's not as fluffy and cake-like. To me, it looked more like a tortilla. I thought it would be more pound cake-ish.

If I were to do this again... well, I wouldn't. But I guess I would make sure not to burn my cake (and maybe try to make it look more like a cake?) so when I rolled it, it would look semi-decent.

I would only recommend this recipe if you're master chef level or want a serious challenge. I don't think everything I went through was worth it in the end. I don't even know who ate the rest of it, my mom might've just thrown it in the trash when I wasn't looking 😢

Is there a recipe that you completely and utterly failed at making, like I did with this one? How did you try to fix it? 

Thanks for reading!

Ojakangas, Beatrice, and Roger LePage. Petite Sweets: Bite-Size Desserts to Satisfy Every Sweet Tooth. Portland, Me.: Sellers, 2009. Print.