Tangy sweet low carb lemon cake roll. This fun keto dessert is perfect for summer get togethers.
I am really on a roll these days. A low carb cake roll. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Get it? Get it? No really, I have been all about the keto cake recipes lately for some reason and I can’t really say why. I have other dessert ideas too, of course. When don’t I have dessert ideas? But cake seems to be my jam at the moment. Hmmmm, jam. Cake. Maybe I need to make a cake with jam in it. Oy…see what I mean?
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Sometimes I like making simple cakes, the kind that use a single bowl and have one layer and voila, you’re done. But sometimes I love the process of the multi-step cakes, with fillings and frostings and garnishes. The kind of recipe that requires me to pull out a million things from my cabinets and make a real mess in the kitchen. I love those because I get completely absorbed in what I am doing, and I find the weight of the world lifting from my shoulders. I am not making that sort of cake to have something to eat, although that’s a nice little benefit. Really, I am making that sort of cake to have something to bake, to create, to involve me utterly.
This low carb lemon cake roll is definitely a multi-step cake, although it’s not actually that hard to make. But it requires multiple bowls and it will definitely absorb your attention for an hour or so. So if that’s your jam too, then you know need to make this! And it is delicious, so you may want to eat it too. Super keto recipe, coming in at about 2g carbs per slice.
By the way, that vibrant yellow in the filling? It’s from all natural yellow food dye. I found these little powder packets and it’s made from turmeric. Be careful, though. You only need a little (not the whole packet). You can skip it, of course, but I wanted some bright lemony yellow to play up the lemon cake roll.
Please see my Low Carb Lemon Cake Roll on A Sweet Life
Used to make this recipe:
Jenny says
Looks absolutely delish. Will try to recreate this this weekend. 😀
Adrian says
I’ve been making this recipe, as well as playing around with your gingerbread roll cake and I have yet to succeed in getting a smooth roll (though I had remarkable success at rolling up a cake that was in 8 pieces into a presentable log). I wonder how sensitive it is to exactly how long it is baked and how long you let it cool before rolling (the recommended cooling time of “a few minutes” is kind of vague). It seems like the longer it bakes, the stiffer it will get and the harder to roll without cracking. On the other hand, if it’s undercooked it’ll probably never come off the towel. 🙂 I have also found it pretty hard to incorporate the dry ingredients without deflating the egg whites and have been experimenting with either using less dry ingredients (some conventional roll cakes contain no flour at all) or adding more liquid.
Another thing I noticed is that my butter and cream cheese mixture is warm. But my whipped cream is cold (because cream whips best as cold as possible). So when I combine them, the cream cheese and butter harden and form lumps. This doesn’t seem ideal. Do you whip warm cream? Let the whipped cream warm up after whipping? Or does the same thing happen to you?
Carolyn says
5 to 10 minutes before rolling it is sufficient. While it cracks a little bit, it shouldn’t crack too much. Maybe it is over baked and your oven runs a bit warm. But if you are experimenting with the dry versus wet ingredients, you may be throwing things off a bit. While conventional cake rolls can be entirely flour free they also contain sugar. That is hygroscopic, meaning it attracts moisture whereas erythritol does not. So some of the dry ingredients help offset this.
I have never ever had that issue of clumping when folding whipped cream into butter and cream cheese (and I’ve made fillings and frostings like this a lot). If your butter and cream cheese are properly combined, it shouldn’t be an issue. The cream should absolutely be chilled.
Are you using a different sweetener, by chance?
Adrian says
I made another trial—my last one for a while because I’ve been eating too much cake! This time I followed the recipe carefully, and took steps to maximize my folding success. I sifted the dry ingredients, and used a larger bowl to minimize deflation while folding. I still felt like I got a lot of deflation, and this mixing method is more complex and difficult. Compared to my previous cake (with added liquid) the texture was a little bit dryer, but that may also relate to cooking time. This cake seemed more cooked. My previous comparison cake I tried to cook for as short a time as possible. I unrolled this cake while it was still warm, which I think decreased cracking somewhat, though I still got a lot of cracking. It doesn’t seem like my alternate mixing method with added water is causing the cakes to be more prone to cracking.
If anybody wants to follow my method, which is a little faster and uses one less bowl: Beat 1/4 cup water plus the egg yolks into the dry ingredients. Stir about 1/4 of the beaten egg whites into this mixture to lighten it, then fold the mixture into the remaining egg whites. (Note also I omitted the lemon juice, since it seemed like not enough to taste. It might be interesting to use 1/4 cup lemon juice instead of water, but that would alter acidity of the batter and could have other effects, so I didn’t try it.) The baking time should be slightly longer and the cake may be slightly thicker, but I find the results are very similar.
Regarding the filling, I got to thinking that maybe it’s not about temperature. The mixture I get looks like a broken emulsion (such as might be described as “curdled”). But it doesn’t have a lumpy texture if I taste it. So I think what’s happening is that I’m unable to combine the whipped cream and the butter mixture and get them to truly mix together. Instead I’m getting pockets of butter mixture surrounded by whipped cream.
Thelma Locke says
URGENT. Please share if the towel touches the cake or does the parchment!!!! I made this it was wonderful but had to be layered cake cuz I rolled it and it cracked!!!! But oh so delicious! Making this Friday for a get together on Saturday.Thanks
Thelma in NH
Carolyn says
It will touch some of the towel as it’s rolled up. If it is sticking too much to that, then you could always do another piece of parchment over it before you start rolling.
Thelma Locke says
Thank you!!!
Adrian says
I dust the towel liberally with almond flour and the cake has never stuck. I think I’ve even taken the parchment off before rolling, dusted the cake on the other side, and still had no problem separating the cake from the towel. However, I find that the cake *always* breaks into a bunch of pieces. I made it tonight and had about 10 pieces. I find, however, that I can spread the filling over the pieces and then by using the towel, I can roll it up and you can’t tell that it was a bunch of fragments. I tried flavoring the filling with passionfruit extract, but I think I like the lemon better. (Now if I used real passion fruit it might be a different story.)
It would be nice to know what to do to get the cake to actually stay intact.
For some reason my July 7 comment is stuck in moderator limbo. Not sure why that happened.
Carolyn says
I wish I could tell you. I am not sure what I do to make it not crack. It cracks a little (cake rolls almost always do, especially low carb and gluten-free ones) but it’s not in pieces, it just has little cracks.
Adrian says
I realized that I may be using a different pan size than you’re using. Perhaps that could explain my cracking problems. Can you tell me the actual dimensions of the 11 x 17 pan that you use? Is the bottom of the pan where you spread the cake actually 11 x 17? Or some other dimension? (I ask this question because I grew up with 8×8 pans that were actually 7×7 if you measured them at the bottom.)
Jackie says
My pan is an 11″ x 17″ pretty much spot on and it rolled okay, one or two cracks that I easily spackled together with filling. I’m making the roll again this weekend and came back to read up on new reviews since I’m curious to try a sprinkle of tumeric for colour in the filling and I wondered, are you using Knox or the grassfed gelatin? I’ve used both
and, for me, the grassfed yields much better results.
Adrian says
I made another trial using a smaller pan (thicker cake) and it still cracked into many pieces. I notice that the cracking occurs upon unrolling because the cake has cooled into a round shape and doesn’t want to unroll. I usually get 8-10 sections that are all a little bit circular, and I can patch it all together into a respectable looking roll.
I’ve always used the Great Lakes beef gelatin when making this cake. What brand of grass fed gelatin are you using? I think the strength of gelatin depends on how the manufacturer formulates it, not on whether it is grass fed or grain fed. (The role of manufacturer formulation is very clear for the sheet gelatin, which comes in different “bloom” strengths, but not so obvious for the powdered ones.)
Jackie Martin says
Same here, the Great Lakes red tin. You mentioned the cracking when unrolling and I agree, that’s when it’s most fragile. I’ve never made a traditional roll cake and wonder if the procedure is the same…if you didn’t roll it to cool and try and rolling from flat when filling would you end up with a worse mess?
Adrian says
It’s the most fragile before it cools. I think it’s not that it’s fragile when being unrolled, but that it’s set into the round shape and I’m trying to make a round thing go straight. I’m guessing that if I didn’t roll it then it would cool flat and when I rolled it I would still get the cracking—but it would be much harder to patch it together into a log because the pieces would be flat instead of round.
Out of curiosity, I checked The Cake Bible to see how some traditional recipes work. They are flourless and fairly low in sugar, so they might not be hard to adapt, and the recipes call for complete cooling before rolling. But the cakes are evidently very moist. I like the contrast in texture between the cake and the filling with Carolyn’s recipe. She gives another recipe for a sponge cake that does include flour and she has you cool it in the rolled up shape