Bûche de Noël
We decided to host four friends for Christmas Day and I wanted to try my hand at a bûche de noël, knowing that rolling a cake is very tricky and that I have not been successful in the past. But I’d had some good bakes this past year and I felt my skills had grown, so I was ready to try it again.
For the main recipe, I used Claire Saffitz’ recipe from Bon Appétit. I decided to go for the chestnut mousse and gild the lily with Saffitz’ best chocolate buttercream (which is a French buttercream) recipe from her Dessert Person book. I used Rose Levy Beranbaum’s recipe for meringue mushrooms.
This involved an odyssey for ingredients. I was desperately searching San Francisco for roasted chestnuts in a jar, but I could not find them. Instead, I found fresh chestnuts, so I roasted them instead. Then I peeled them and cooked them in a sugar syrup until they were soft. I pureed that mixture with a little more syrup until it made a stiff, sticky paste. This I used to make the chestnut mousse.
A French buttercream, if you’ve never made it, is made with egg yolks and sugar beaten together into which you whip a sugar syrup. Once that’s added, you can add in the butter - it’s involved and tricky but does it make the best chocolate buttercream I’ve ever had!
Rolling the cake, as you can see was a huge disaster. It just cracked and fell apart all over the cutting board. I briefly considered throwing it all away and trying again, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of making an third cake (I’d already made one to throw away since I somehow completely misread the ingredients, using only two eggs instead of five!) and roasting and candying and pureeing the chestnuts all over again. So I sallied forth and covered it with chocolate buttercream, meringue mushrooms, and powdered sugar. A log it is not… but a plank it very well might be. So instead of a bûche de noël, maybe what I made was a planche de noël.
Delicious though it was, I’ll never make one again! Too much work, too much pressure, and not enough success. Count me out for the rolled cakes, thank you very much.
