On Christmas Day I hosted my first ever Christmas Dinner (normally we end up at a rellie’s house, not ours!) I wanted to make a dessert that was Christmassy and chocolately and looked cool, so I decided to make yule log. This is not something I’ve ever done before, and yule logs aren’t something we see a lot of in NZ (as Tammy mentions here, where she shows off her one that looks pretty darn cool!), but I’d bought a Christmas cookbook with a yule log recipe and it looked really neat in the photo!
I wanted to make it the day before but ran out of time (too busy making vanilla cookies and gingerbread men and biscotti!) so I ended up making it on Christmas Day while the roast lamb was cooking. The recipe didn’t have any rising agent in it, and required whisking the eggs for 5 mins or so. Once I’d folded the flour in the mixture was still quite lumpy but I was scared to overmix it so I put it in the pan lumpy. It cooked lumpy. And flat. I knew I should have practised! Luckily I’d made sure I had plenty of eggs, so I whipped up a chocolate sponge from the Chocolate Log recipe in the Edmonds book (yay – it had baking powder!). That came out better – phew!
I spread whipped cream over the sponge – I had intended to fold pureed strawberries into the cream but A and I had sort of demolished the whole punnet on Christmas Eve, dipping them into warm melted chocolate (mmmmmmmmmmm). Then instead of a buttercream icing like Tammy’s one, I used dark chocolate ganache. I was a bit impatient and didn’t let the ganache cool down and get firm enough before spreading it, so it slipped down the sides a little into pools of chocolately goodness ;o) I used a fork to try and make it look log-ish.
The final touch was a dusting of icing sugar – its supposed to look like snow I guess! Which is daft in the middle of summer, but thats Christmas in New Zealand for you LOL. I served it with vanilla icecream and it was a big hit!
The photos aren’t the best, and I didn’t have a decent serving dish but you get the idea…
