Birch de Noel

I love the concept of a Buche de Noel (or Yule log).  The dessert is traditionally served during the holidays in France.  It is shaped like a freshly cut log and often decorated with meringue  mushrooms, berries, and rosemary sprigs to give it that wintery look.  I’ve recently been raving about Francois Payard’s version after seeing him make it on Bobby Flay’s Throwdown last year, but my fascination for yule logs goes back to a winter white version done by Martha Stewart.

 
Payard’s buche de noel                                          Martha Stewart’s birch de noel

Eight years ago I watched the episode of Martha Stewart Living where she made a Birch de Noel.  Instead of a brown log, she decorated it white to look like  a log from a birch tree.  I was inspired but it seemed a bit daunting to make everything from scratch so I used cake mix and premade frosting, which I jazzed up with a little too much peppermint extract so it tasted like toothpaste.

Fast forward to today, I finally decided to make the entire thing from scratch for Christmas.  I’m not going to lie.  It’s pretty time consuming even when you prep over several days, but it’s the holidays so I think it was worth the extra effort.

Birch de Noel Prep Plan
2 days ahead- white chocolate mousse
1 day ahead- chocolate genoise cake, fill and assemble
day of- frosting

White Chocolate Mousse

The white chocolate mixture should be ribbon like and cooled so when combined with the whip cream, the mousse stays fluffy.

combining the chocolate and whip cream to create the mousse filling

Chocolate Genoise

After baking the genoise, I dusted the top with powdered sugar and flipped it onto parchment paper resting on a damp dish towel.

 

Then I rolled the cake up, from the long end, into a log and let it cool.  By doing this, the cake will not crack when you go roll it up again after filling it with mousse.

The fun part!  Filling it with mousse.

After re-rolling the cake, trim the ends of the log so you have clean sides, then cut off two pieces at a diagonal and place them on the log so they look like branches.

Adding the frosting, the final touch for making it look like a birch log.

Birch de Noel
from marthastewart.com

When researching online for tips on this recipe I didn’t find much to work with, so I hope these notes are helpful should you decide to make one.  I used three different recipes to create this yule log, as if making the log wasn’t complicated enough. 🙂  The white chocolate mousse is part of the Birch recipe, but I used different recipes for the other two parts, as I have explained below.

White Chocolate Mousse
This recipe makes a lot of mousse.  I used all of it and it was about 1″ thick on the cake which is way too much in comparison to the thickness of the cake.  I would cut down to 2/3″ because it’s difficult to roll with so much mousse.  When spreading the mousse on the cake, it will be a bit stiff from being in the refrigerator.  After frosting the cake, let it sit out for about 2 hours and it will be the perfect consistency for eating.

Chocolate Genoise
Of the three recipes, this was the only one that didn’t work out so well.  The Birch de Noel recipe come with its own cake recipe that uses all purpose flour, where I wanted to use cake flour so that it would be more fluffy.  It came out a bit tough.  It may have been because my sheet pan was 11 x 17″ rather than the 10 x 15″ jelly roll size, so the cake was a bit thinner than what was called for.

Seven-Minute Frosting
from blog, Smitten Kitchen, recipe from Joy of Cooking

Martha’s recipe made me a bit nervous because the last egg white frosting did not whip up properly.  I needed more guidance so I followed the instructions from the blog, Smitten Kitchen.  This version worked out perfectly, fluffy and glossy.  Just make sure you have a hand mixer.  This also needs to be made the day of because it will stiffen the day after.