Bûche de Noël

Date Completed: 12/25/2022

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! I decided to skip a few of my catch-up posts to get my Bûche de Noël recipe completed timely. I’ll circle back to the ones I skipped!

For three years, Garrett and I have done a “baking project” around the holidays. We try to pick something fun that we’ve never done before. We kicked off this tradition in 2020 with festive cake pops. In 2021 we tried our hand at 3D cookies decorated in royal icing. We love this tradition and always have a ton of fun!

There was much discussion for 2022 - ideas included Baked Alaska and gingerbread houses/people. We landed on Bûche de Noël after seeing it featured on many of our favorite baking show competitions.

It seems appropriate that the recipe came from our newest book: French Pastry Made Simple by Molly Wilkinson. She has a chapter devoted to Génoise et Joconde: Rolled or Layered Sponge Cake. It’s all very French!

We made three components for our roll: the cake itself, a dark chocolate ganache topping, and a milk chocolate French buttercream filling. Two out of three recipes took us quite outside our baking comfort zone!

This was our first time making génoise cake though we have seen it made countless times on our baking shows. The first thing I realized was that we actually didn’t have the right size baking pan. Oops! We had pans just bigger and just smaller, so we decided to use the bigger.

To make the batter itself, we whipped up eggs and sugar until they tripled in size and passed the “ribbon test.” This took about 8 minutes in our stand mixer. A common theme in this project: long mixing times!

Garrett was very excited about measuring the flour to exactly 65 grams! This is about a half cup. I thought it was interesting that the recipe called for such a small amount of flour.

In the next step, we sifted the flour into the batter and then folded it. The recipe gives you the mission of preventing too much air loss. I found it quite difficult to fold carefully enough not to lose air while still actually incorporating the flour. I kept finding hidden pockets of unmixed flour! It’s also interesting the you can actually hear the air bubbles popping - a similar sound to a glass of champagne sitting next to you.

Then we got to a part that made me feel like we were thickening a soup rather than mixing up cake batter. We had a bowl of melted butter that needed to be incorporated. The instructions told us to take a scoop of batter out of the main bowl and whisk it into the butter bowl. Then we put that mixture into the main bowl and folded it in. I thought this was quite interesting! I also noted that I felt it was nearly impossible to tell if the buttered batter was truly incorporated. It all looked the same!

We poured the batter onto a tray lined with parchment paper. Since we had gone with the big pan, we didn’t spread it all the way to the sides. This baked for about 9 minutes and then we covered the whole pan with a damp cloth to keep it moist as it cooled.

The cake did not rise much at all. I would be curious to try it in the correct size pan though it could have also been the folding process knocking out too much air.

I had always seen people roll up their cakes right out of the oven to prevent cracking, but this recipe did not call for it.

Thankfully, the second part of the process was about 100 times easier than making the cake! To make the dark chocolate ganache, we chopped up the chocolate (a mixture of 60% and 72%). We then melted the chocolate in the microwave and simmered some heavy cream on the stove. All we had to do was mix them together and then leave it to cool to room temperature. Phew! 2 out of 3 complete.

Last component: Milk Chocolate French Buttercream. The recipe gives a substitute for American Buttercream, but we were still feeling adventurous!

We started by whipping up 4 egg yolks in the stand mixer while heating a sugar syrup on the stove. The egg yolks didn’t seem to do much in more than 5 minutes, but they did lighten in color slightly.

The recipe instructed us to cook the sugar syrup to 244 degrees. Ugh! Heating sugar syrups to exact temperatures is just not fun. I don’t think we have the right equipment for it either. Our candy thermometer is not great and our digital thermometer just isn’t quite quick enough to give accurate readings in that scenario. But we made it!

The next step is to pour the syrup into the egg mixture with the whisk on low speed. The recipe warns against pouring the syrup into the whisk itself so we dripped it down the side of the bowl. This worked great at first, but some of the syrup firmed up on the side of the bowl and had to be helped downward.

This mixture whisked on medium high speed for 10 minutes. Then we started adding soft butter one chunk at a time. It was fun because you can really see the butter get incorporated to the rest of the mixture by the whisk!

The last step was adding melted milk chocolate and whipping it in. We actually used something called “dark milk” chocolate (though I suspect this is more branding than anything else).

We had done it! Three components complete and ready for assembly!

First assembly step: rolling up the cake with the filling to get our signature swirl inside and log shape outside. The fact that our cake was so pancake-y made this a snap for Garrett! No cracking or difficult rolling at all. Yay!

After firming up our log in the fridge for 30 minutes, we decided to do the fun “side branch” technique by slicing a piece at the end. I’m glad we did this because it made the cake so darn cute!

My cake decorating skills are still in development, and I had a bit of apprehension about the the icing process. Three things really helped:

(1) The ganache was thick but soft.

(2) The cake was very smooth and didn’t have crumbs that flaked off into the ganache.

(3) The ganache stuck to the surface of the cake very well.

I thought it turned out so very darling! We put the characteristic bark texture in the ganache on top. I even drew a swirl on the covered end to make it look like a log! We left the other two ends uncovered because the swirl was so pretty.

We didn’t go so far to make any meringue mushrooms or chocolate trees, but I loved the simplicity of our Bûche de Noël! Some powdered sugar made it a true white Christmas.

Taste Report:

So how did it taste?! The milk chocolate buttercream filling was so silky and delicious! It had a very light chocolate flavor. The bolder flavor of the dark chocolate ganache balanced it perfectly. I loved that we got so many swirls in our cake because that resulted in many layers of buttercream!

The cake itself left a bit to be desired. In Garrett’s words “it tastes like a pancake without syrup.” There wasn’t much flavor to it, but really the problem was that it was so thin! Some parts got as thin as a crepe. Very odd!

I also thought it was interesting that the cake batter wasn’t flavored - not even with vanilla.

I do think for our first attempt we did a really great job! It did pair perfectly with a glass of champagne! I’m excited to try more roll cake recipes now and see how we can improve our cake technique!

Mess Report:

Any cake is destined to cause a true mess because of the multiple components. Our Bûche de Noël was no different! We did a round of dishes in the middle because both the cake and buttercream required many of the same tools.

Oh well! We don’t have much going on right now so plenty of time to do the dishes.

And plenty of time for fun cake photoshoots with the tree and a cute candle!

Wishing you a season of joy and plenty of cake!