Only on Christmas Chocolate Roulage

Chocolate Roulage

Most every family has a traditional meal that they will eat on Easter, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. Some of these dishes you might dread and some of them are so amazing you crave them long before the holiday ever comes. I never look forward to the sweet potato casserole on Christmas day; but the Chocolate Roulage is the dish that I yearn for. My aunt Jordie makes this dish every single Christmas and every single Christmas I scarf down all my food, just to get to the chocolate roulage.

The Chocolate Roulage recipe my aunt uses originated from a women’s missionary union old church group in 1953. They published their recipe in the “Once in a Blue Moon” cookbook. It only makes sense that a recipe this good would be made by a bunch of old ladies with a lot of cooking experience. My aunt did not get the recipe from the cookbook but from a restaurant called Cobb Lane. Cobb Lane is in the South Side of Birmingham and they are famous for their chocolate roulage. This is the type of place that serves “girly” food and old snobby ladies sit around and eat their quiche in large Sunday hats. I will not knock this place too hard because this is where my aunt got the adored chocolate roulage recipe.

Chocolate roulage is a French dish and roulage is the French word for rolled up. It is called a roulage and not a rollup cake because there is no flour used in the recipe. Flour normally qualifies a cake as a cake. Chocolate roulage is a flat moist chocolate sponge “cake” that is spread with a sweet rich cream and then rolled up, after being rolled up it is dusted with coco powder. In the end it looks like a large Swiss cake roll but tastes nothing like one. This dessert is said “to not be served on your first try at making it” because there are many tedious steps when making the dish. You must use strong dark coffee and good semi-sweet chocolate in the “cake” part of it. You must use parchment paper when rolling up the roulage or else it will not work. After the roulage is rolled you have to cover it with a damp warm cloth while it rests. All this work is worth it because when you take a bite it literally feels like velvet in your mouth. The mixture of the cream and the soft chocolate cake slowly slides down the back of your throat and there is nothing else in this world like it. It is a must to wash down the delicious velvet with milk and only milk. There is a technique that must be known to eat chocolate roulage. When you put a bite on your fork and put it in your mouth you can not inhale. If you inhale you will inhale the loose coco powder and cough. The first time I ever ate it I inhaled the coco powder and started coughing. It is hilarious to sit and watch the family members around you who start coughing after their first bite.

This year I just couldn’t wait to have the roulage so I asked my aunt to make it for Easter. I have never been so excited about eating a dessert then when I saw her walk in our front door with that platter of chocolate roulage. Once it was time for dessert I cut a huge slice and dug in. As I was chewing the first bite I realized something wasn’t right. It just wasn’t the same as it is on Christmas. The absence of the dim Christmas tree lights and all the decorations made the roulage seem different. The dessert is strictly a dessert for Christmas day.

I love to cook at home and try to replicate anything that I eat, but I will never attempt to cook roulage for many reasons. One reason is that I don’t think that I could ever make it as good as my aunt does, my aunt is just one of those people who is naturally an amazing cook. She could easily be the chef of a five star restaurant. Another reason is that it would take away the special tradition of having it on Christmas day. Being made to wait a whole year to taste it makes it just that much more special to everyone. The most important reason of why I will never try and replicate the roulage is that roulage is almost a sacred dish to me. Roulage is not just a dish of deliciousness served on Christmas day, when I think of the roulage I think of my whole family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, cousins, and brothers) all together at Christmas. I literally smile and get a warm feeling when I think about our whole family eating in the dining room and the 20 different conversations happening at the same time. The dish is not only a good memory but it is also like a peace keeper on Christmas. Somehow every Christmas someone will bring up a touchy subject like; politics, the Alabama coach, or something in the news, and it will start a mildly heated subject. This little heated discussion will last through the whole meal but when the pot of coffee is brewed and the roulage is cut, it is forgotten. The room becomes quieter, except for the occasional cough on the coco powder, all conversations dim. I will go as far to say that if you gave everyone in the world roulage, there would be world peace, that is how good it really is.