Before I get into this weekend’s bake, I have a very important PSA: Pregnancy brain is REAL. I’ll admit that before I was pregnant, I thought it was just a cute little excuse. But 7 months in… it is 100% real and 100% taking over my brain. The latest example of pregnancy brain in full effect in my house: I opened my fridge this weekend and found that somehow there were 7 full boxes unsalted butter in there. That’s right. SEVEN.

Turns out that for the last few weeks, instead of ordering salted butter for my morning toast, I have continued to order UNsalted butter. There were definitely a couple of times where I caught the error myself after unpacking the grocery delivery, but then with each new order, I still kept managing to order unsalted butter. On Friday night, I was looking around for a snack, and found 5 boxes in the usual butter area. Already, it had hit me that pregnancy brain had obviously struck again. Then this morning, I moved the carton of eggs, and found 2 more boxes of butter! I have a feeling my husband placed the other 2 boxes away from its friends in an effort to hide the massive overstock of unsalted butter from me as not to make me feel badly. What a guy.

Well, I’ve got to do something with all this butter now. So, while I had already planned to make this ube cake roll this weekend, I changed it up a bit to include an ube buttercream icing to top it with purple rosettes. And you know what that means? That’s 1 whole box down and 6 more to go! So please, if you have any ideas for some butter-heavy recipes, do let me know in the comments… Just don’t tell my doctor!

Alright. PSA over. On to the ube cake! And if you’re new to ube, check out my blog post on ube swirl rolls where I share a bit of the explanation on what ube is :)

For the cake roll, I found this recipe for an ube chiffon cake from Woman Scribbles. Similar to last week’s lime ricotta cake, this one required some technical skills separating eggs, getting the egg whites to stiff peaks, then folding the beaten egg whites into the ube batter to get it ever so light & airy.

Honestly most of the work for this cake was in the ingredient prep. Since you’re just baking a thin sheet cake, the actual bake isn’t very long at all. It was barely enough time for me to finish cleaning up the mess I made making the batter! That reminds me - one more PSA here: ube flavoring is M E S S Y. This was my first time working with it, and while it makes for some gorgeous cakes & icing, this stuff can truly stain. I recommend covering your surface or having a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser handy. I ended up working on my silicon baking mat after I realized how hard it was to get a small drop cleaned off of my counter.

Anyway, once you’ve got your batter done and in your sheet pan, it only needs to bake for about 10 minutes until it’s ready. Then you’ve got some more technical skill fun. I’ve seen enough episodes of the Great British Baking Show where they make cake rolls to know that you’ve got to start rolling the cake while it’s still hot so that it can keep that shape later even after you’ve spread on the icing. The original recipe directions didn’t call for this, but I’ve seen enough disasters on GBBS to know that I could not let the cake cool before doing this.

So once you carefully remove the cake from the pan with the parchment paper still on, roll it tightly starting from one of the short sides. Place the rolled cake on a wire rack, and let it cool completely like this. While the cake cools, make the buttercream.

For the buttercream, I just used a classic vanilla buttercream recipe of butter, powdered sugar, and a couple tablespoons of heavy whipping cream. Rather than vanilla extract, I went for the same ube flavoring that I used for the cake. I also took an extra step to sift my powdered sugar with each addition to the creamed butter. I had been reading quite a few different recipes, and saw that doing this makes for a creamier, silkier consistency. I definitely made a mess doing this, but think it was worth it. This was definitely the most silky buttercream I’ve ever made!

Once the cake roll was cool, I unrolled it, spread a thin layer of the buttercream on it, then rolled it back up while carefully removing the parchment paper this time. I then wrapped the cake roll in plastic wrap and placed it in the fridge to firm up for about an hour. This also gave me some time to practice piping out my rosettes before I tried it out on the cake itself!

The decorating is of course entirely up to you, but I really wanted to try out my piping skills today, so I went for these rosettes using a 1M cake decorating tip. These look fancier than they are. It’s really just a simple swirl motion, but that 1M tip makes it look just lovely! I’ve still got a lot of practicing to do, but I was pretty happy with these.

My icing seemed pretty soft, and I was afraid it would completely fall apart once I cut into it, so I put the decorated cake back into the fridge for about an hour. Think this is what really helped it to hold up its shape after we cut into it.