This will be a new Muse tradition. I just love this cake: the way it looks, the way it tastes, and the tradition.
The Buche de Noel, or Yule Log, was this month's Daring Baker challenge. The rest of the group and their links can be found by clicking here: Daring Bakers. Be warned, though. Like I said yesterday, I didn't exactly follow all the rules. The two I stuck with were using the swiss meringue recipe given and making marzipan mushrooms. After the click I've posted the recipe I used for the pumpkin genoise from Paula Deen and noted the alterations I made to the swiss buttercream for maple flavored and how I came up with cardamom buttercream for filling.
I do have to tell one Gene story. I had the roll cut and laid out and was frosting it when Gene came into the kitchen and deadpanned "Are you going to be baking that again or cooking it in some way?" I said "Uh. No, of course not. I'm frosting it now." He said, "Then you need to have gloves on because that's a health code violation to handle any food barehanded that won't be cooked afterwards." Smartass bas***d. :-) I knew I taught him too much about the food business when I was in it.
The whole family loved it although next year I might try for a different filling. The buttercream on the outside was so rich that it made the buttercream on the inside overkill. One small piece will do you and with a table full of other desserts, including fudge, it was almost too much, too rich. As a stand alone dessert it would have been perfect but as one of many, next year I'll change the filling but I haven't quite decided to what yet.
You know, really this is an easy cake. It looks very impressive, is a wonderful holiday dessert table centerpiece, and makes people ooh and ahh, but in reality, it's not nearly as hard as it looks. That's a winner in my book.
Here's a close up of the mushrooms and poinsettia.
I do have one great family party story. Auntie Miranda made the suggestion at Thanksgiving that we draw names, a children's group and an adult group, for Christmas, set a limit of $5.00 and make it "a fun gift" however each person interpretted it. Some of the gifts were fun, some funny, and some nice. My brother Kenneth is the "fun gift" high master. He had drawn our sister, Suzanne's, name and bought her a box of chocolates. Except that the box of chocolates he bought totalled more than $5.00...hmmm..what to do? So he calculated the cost per chocolate, by hand and showed his math work on the front of the box, and then proceeded to eat chocolates until he was down to a gift worth $5.00. Oh, okay, there was one more little thing. Every time he bit into one he didn't care for or didn't want to finish, he left that half in the box, subtracted the half from the total and moved on. So not only were there empty chocolate holes, there was half a turtle, half a caramel, half a peanut butter cup, etc.
We all bow to your greatness, Sir Joke-A-Lot.
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