The final touch is meringue mushrooms dusted with cocoa and a skiff of a professional-grade powdered sugar. Roberts finishes each bûche de Noël with twining leaves and red berries, then places fresh flowers around the dessert. Home bakers can achieve a similar look by frosting the cake with an offset spatula and then dragging a fork along the log to create the bark. She uses a pastry bag with a serrated tip to create the look of bark on the log. Roberts cuts one end of the log off and places it perpendicular to the log to create a branch. Place the rolled cake seam side down on a platter to ready it for frosting. The custard can also be made in advance, but be sure to place plastic wrap right on top of the finished custard to prevent a film from forming. Roberts gently spreads vanilla custard on the cake and rolls it using the parchment to prevent cracking. Experiment with different flavor fillings and frostings to create you own signature dessert. The sponge cake is versatile and can simply be filled with strawberries and whipped cream and rolled up for a simple dessert, Roberts says. Once it has cooled, the flexible, yet sturdy cake should be rolled up on parchment paper or a kitchen towel sprinkled with powdered sugar until it is ready to be filled. “If you try to take it off when it’s too warm, it will stick,” she says. She suggests baking the sponge cake on parchment, and cooling the cake completely before trying to remove it. “When I was at Patsy Clark’s I had to bake a bunch and I only had a two-pan deck oven … by the time the last ones came out it was like an omelet, just because it’s purely eggs.” “One thing you have to be real careful of is that as soon as you put the cake in your pan, bake it off because it will deflate,” Roberts says. She demonstrated the steps to assemble the cake and shared some of her tips recently at the Just American Desserts bakery in Spokane Valley. The cake is finished with holly decorations, meringue mushrooms and fresh flowers. Then Roberts fills the cake with vanilla custard and covers it with chocolate buttercream frosting. She creates the cake using a recipe she found years ago in “Cocolat” by Alice Medrich, renowned cookbook author and baker. “It’s pretty labor intensive… but you can do a lot of it in advance,” Roberts says. The cake is now a holiday tradition for many of the customers of Just American Desserts, which Roberts opened with her family in 1986.
She tried again more than 25 years ago when she was the original pastry chef at Patsy Clark’s restaurant and perfected her technique. One bite of the intense, decadent dessert and guests won’t care that your pronunciation was less than perfect.īûche de Noël (BOOSH de noh-EHL) – literally, Christmas log or Yule log – can be labor intensive and more than a bit intimidating.Įva Roberts, owner of Just American Desserts in Spokane Valley, first tackled the dessert as a 14-year-old French student. Bûche de Noël, the filled, rolled and decorated cake, makes an impressive centerpiece for any Christmas feast.
Even if the name of this traditional French dessert doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue, no one will mind.
0 kommentar(er)
