Published: November 25, 2024
By: Susan Rosser
Impress your dinner guests this holiday season with a homemade bûche de Noël. Of course, you may need to have the remainder of the dinner catered, as this recipe is quite an undertaking. In fact, if you actually pull it off, it could be considered a Christmas miracle — or whatever holiday you celebrate.
I love to bake, but a bûche de Noël (also known as a Yule log) seemed outrageously ambitious. I envisioned a kitchen disaster story featuring failed attempts with crumbling cakes and separated cream. And truth be told, if chocolate wasn’t involved, I would have lost my nerve. Here is my story.
A bûche de Noël includes three recipes: one for the cake, one for the cream filling and another for the frosting. This means you will utilize nearly every bowl in your kitchen, including the ones buried deep within your cabinets. Seriously, engage some elves to help with the cleanup.
Apparently, it is easier to roll up a cake while it is still warm and in a somewhat submissive state. But, you can’t put cream filling on hot cake. So all bûche de Noël recipes call for rolling the cake while it is warm and letting it cool in that rolled-up position. I won’t lie. This part frightened me. I felt like a first-year surgical resident about to perform a triple bypass on an unsuspecting patient — with no senior surgeon nearby to walk me through it. And while I love to bake, I prefer recipes that require little to no decoration. And yet, I found myself baking a cake meant to resemble a fallen log in a Bavarian forest. I suppose I was motivated by the chocolate and mascarpone.
I primarily followed the recipe I found on http://www.kingarthurbaking.com (with just a slight variation on the cream filling and the addition of a bit of cherry jam.) This recipe was definitely out of my baking comfort zone, but I know some readers will love making this as a family project on a rainy day during the holiday break or maybe as a hostess gift. I was so wary of overcooking the cake (which would make rolling nearly impossible) that I undercooked it just a touch. Still, the frosting and the filling were so scrumptious that even a semi-failed cake couldn’t ruin this show-stopper. Unwrap this classic recipe using the King Arthur Baking link below.
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/yule-log-classic-buche-de-noel-recipe
