Buche de Noel

First of all, a note of caution: when your adorable baby brother asks you for help with a project for his French class, say no. Even when he gives you that cute little puppy dog face, say no. Otherwise you’ll end up like me: 25, running home early from work school, worrying about whether it really matters if you can’t sift your cake flour. (And for those of you wondering, the answer is yes, kind of, probably.)

So after doing more than my fair share of research into the culinary art known as baking, here’s what I learned about the buche de noel we needed to make. Its a traditional French dessert served during the holidays, and is known in English as a “yule log”. Its a thin, genoise cake, rolled with frosting (jelly roll style) and garnished to resemble a real tree log. Interestingly enough, genoise cakes are actually Italian (and really not that straight forward to bake).

We started off with three eggs and three egg yolks. If you have never seen two teenagers (my brother and his project partner) try and separate an egg yolk from the white, I highly recommend it. Its hilarious. To the eggs we added a pinch of salt and a fair amount of sugar. Then came the whisking. We don’t have a fancy stand mixer so this was all hand done, old school. The bowl with the sugary egg mixture was then placed on top of a pot of simmering water and there was more whisking. My mom did most of this step, mainly because she actually knew how this was supposed to go. She even brought out the big guns: the hand-held mixer. This is where the recipe broke down, though. It said to whisk until the mixture was room temperature or about 100 degrees. Now call me crazy, but 100 degrees is not room temperature. So we kind of ignored the temperature requirements and just whisked until the mixture had nearly tripled in size.

Genoise cakes have no leavening agents, so their ability to rise depends entirely on the air trapped within the batter. This is why it’s so important to fold in the dry ingredients, rather than stir them in, so we folded in the sifted cocoa powder, cornstarch, and cake flour. After all of that we poured the batter into a paper-lined, buttered baking sheet, smoothed it out as much as possible and popped it into the oven.

Fast forward 12 minutes and out popped a dark, chocolatey genoise cake that looked perfect. We pulled it off the baking sheet and set it up on some wire racks to cool. It didn’t take too long because the cake is so thin. This is where things started to fall apart (literally). When it came time to separate the cake from its beloved wax paper, the two refused to part. Actually most of the cake came off pretty well, but one part refused to leave the paper. We ended up with a little hole that was later patched with icing.

The kids spread one coat of icing (store bought…I would have seriously preferred to make our own, but in the interest of getting homework and stuff done I was overruled by both parental units) and tried to roll the cake. I tried to help them. This is where we realized that the edges of our cake were a bit dry, and thus prone to cracking. We got it into a roughly cylindrical form, which is more than I can say for Tyler Florence on last night’s Iron Chef (although I’m sure his cake was far superior), and then off it went into the freezer to firm up a bit.

I mentioned that the icing was store-bought, but I didn’t mention that it was super chocolatey…not dark or bittersweet chocolate, but that kind of sugary milk chocolate that soothes the soul in a primal way that we’ll never be able to truly understand. When the cake came out of the freezer, the kids coated it with another layer of icing, and then on top of that they added chocolate chips (luckily these were semisweet).

They were so proud of their creation, and who could blame them? The final product was this uber chocolate monstrosity that was so sweet that I think you have to be under the age of 15 to be able to truly appreciate it. The rest of us are just so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of chocolate and sugar. It actually turned out ok, which is more than I can say for our kitchen. There are egg whites (from one of the yolk extraction blunders) and chocolate everywhere, not to mention the millions of bowls, pans, and utensils.

I think next time I’ll try a homemade butter cream frosting and some espresso to keep it from being overwhelmingly chocolatey. Also, maybe I’ll consider getting a real jelly roll pan, instead of using an oversized cookie sheet.