A Buche de Noel

I love baking.  Love it!  I find it such a meditative and rewarding way to spend time.  I love being in a cosy kitchen with the oven humming.  Pouring, measuring, sifting, rolling, whisking, kneading. Trying out new recipes I have found online or making happily familiar recipes that a friend, or usually Mum, has passed on to me.

 

Mum is a great baker.  Some of my most comforting memories from childhood are of sitting on the kitchen bench watching mum methodically create a cake.  She had an old blue recipe book where she had handwritten all her favourite recipes that she had collected from friends and family over the years.  Recipes cut from magazines were also tucked into the book, which was very well worn and felt at the same time delicate and enduring.

 

Mum taught me a lot about cooking.  She would explain as she was going what she was doing and why.  I would help her by gradually adding spoonfuls of caster sugar as she whipped egg whites, explaining to me how important it was to add sugar gradually, making sure it all dissolved into the egg whites for a successful pavlova.  Or showing me how to gently fold flour into a sponge cake batter, to keep it light and fluffy.  I loved sifting flour into the big white mixing bowl.  We had such a cute sifter, with a crank handle and a picture of retro-coloured flowers on the front.

 

And then there was always the beaters to lick at the end – which was really such a bonus.  Lucky Mum only had two kids, which meant one beater each.  What happens in families with more than 2 kids I wonder.  Probably no beater licking at all, to avoid fights.

 

Anyway, I am starting this blog because I really love baking and I really love writing and I like to show off my finished products.  Which are so transient.  I reckon baking is like building sandcastles or making pinatas – you produce such beautiful looking objects, only for them to be demolished by waves/sugar-high kids/hungry mouths.

 

I was inspired to start the blog today - Christmas Day 2020 - because I have just spent nearly a full week baking Christmas stuff, culminating in a bloody awesome dessert for Christmas lunch today. 

 

There will be no humblebragging here – just outright, self-praise about how it was such a success and how freaking delicious it tasted!  Thankfully, because it took hours to plan and put together and I would have been massively disappointed if it didn’t end up looking good or tasting right.

 

The dessert was a Buche de Noel – a traditional French Christmas dessert.  The Buche de Noel is to the French what I guess the Christmas Pudding is to the English – something that you only eat once a year at Christmas, which is lucky, because it requires a fair bit of faffing around.

 

Buche de Noel means yuletide log, and I think it can be pretty much any flavour or composition of elements you like, provided it is in a log shape.  I think traditionally it is supposed to be made like a jelly roll.  The cake part can be any flavour – most commonly chocolate or vanilla – and the ‘jelly’ part is never jelly, but rather cream – flavoured caramel, chocolate, hazelnut, chestnut, whatever.  Then the outside of the log is covered in butter cream or ganache and the top commonly decorated with Christmassy figurines.

 

I have also seen lots of Buche de Noels – or ‘buches’ as they are often called - made like a layered mousse with fruity flavours like mango and peach.

 

But always in the shape of a log.

 

This was my first Buche de Noel and I was making it for gathering of ‘buche connoisseurs’.  While I have probably had around 8 or so Christmases in France, hence 8 Buche de Noels, these guys have been eating them for a lifetime.  In fact 2 guests at the table, Romain's grandparents, were 88 and 92, so that is a bloody lot of buches I was up against.

 

I had deferred to Romain’s dad to guide me on the best flavour option, as he probably cares more about desserts than the others.

 

He nominated caramel.

 

But that sounded a bit boring to me.

 

So I started dreaming up flavour combinations.  Caramel and pear sounded good.  Then again I had never seen a fruit-filled buche on the Christmas table, so I wasn’t 100% sure it was going to fly.  But I started googling and found several French recipes for salted caramel and pear buches.  They looked amazing.  So I deviated slightly from my brief, and committed to this flavour combo. 

 

I didn’t want it to be a sooky caramel colour on the outside though because I wanted my buche to look like a real log.  So I decided to do a chocolate ganache frosting.

 

This meant creating a Frankenstein recipe from different sources – the cake, filling and frosting all came from different websites and blogs.

 

In my searches I found some really amazing looking buches – with lots of realistic forresty details.  These were mainly American sites.  French don’t really do cute cakes.  They do delicious cakes – but rarely cute cakes.  Kids’ birthday cakes are commonly an extremely delectable but decidedly un-festive looking affair.  It is the taste that matters above all else, to hell with the frippery!

 

I love the frippery.  So I wanted my buche to taste good AND look good.

 

This required me to start 4 days ahead of Christmas, spending time each day making meringue mushrooms and fondant leaves which I then dried and painted.  On advice from Romain’s Aunt, I made the cake and the filling the day before Christmas.  I used a viennoise recipe for the cake and a salted butter caramel cream recipe for the filling.  I cut fine slices of tinned pear and lay them between paper towel to absorb some of the moisture.  When the cake was cooked, it had to be placed on a damp tea towel and rolled up, to keep its shape.  Once cooled, I had to carefully unroll it and sprinkle it with juice from the tinned pears – and a bit of pear flavoured rakia that we had from our time in Kosovo.  After that, I spread the delicious caramel cream over the whole thing, and finally placed the thin slices of pear over the cream, before rolling it all back up again, gladwrapping it and putting it in the fridge overnight.

 

This morning I started my ganache, using caramel flavoured cooking chocolate.  Things almost went to shit when I got my ratios wrong and the ganache was too runny for my purposes.  But I added a truck-load more chocolate and some marscapone too and it thickened up good and proper.

 

Once this was done it took me not too long to make it look pretty with the mushroom and leaves, fresh red currents and also some green-coloured almond flour moss.

 

I was very happy with how cute it turned out – but as I said – the French shit on cute, and if it didn’t taste good I would surely be flogged.  Or excommunicated.  Or at the very least made to feel as though I had completely ruined Christmas for everyone.  Forever.

 

Thankfully it was DELICIOUS.  If I do say so myself.  And I do.  Even though I don’t eat sugar or flour anymore, I could not resist a few mouthfuls.

 

The biggest hit were the mushrooms.  Which do look extremely real.  So much so that Romain’s family thought I had made a Christmas cake, and then covered it with mushrooms (“bloody weird Australians”).  They were all relieved and happy to discover they were in fact just meringue and dark chocolate with a dusting of cocoa powder on top.  Pepe ate about 15 of them.  It made me very happy.

 

So my first Buche de Noel got a thumbs up from the Frenchies and I was super proud that I made something that looked enchanting and tasted great.

 

And here it is: