By the time you read this, I will be in Thailand, or making my way to India, or something. I’m going to use/am using WordPress’ handy timestamp feature so that I can go on vacation and have this thing post itself.
Recipe: Yule log. This month’s challenge was hosted by Lis of La Mia Cucina and Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice. The full recipe will be on their blogs by the time I publish this, so go check it out. Thanks also to Helene aka Tartelette for helping out.
At first I thought that this would be fairly easy; i’ve made a similar sort of rolled log cake before. But I’ve never made any meringue mushrooms before, though I have worked with meringe. Past jelly roll/yule logs I’ve made haven’t used a genoise, and I’ve never made any Swiss buttercreams either. At first we had to use the recipe for the buttercream, coffee and all, but then we were given the freedom to alter the recipe as long as it still made a dark buttercream. Not a huge fan of coffee, and definitely not a fan of the little bit of alcohol in the original recipe (alcohol added in desserts often annoys me because just as often as not, they don’t actually label it in a way that you know there’s alcohol in there. I would have taken this out whether or not we had permission to), so I decided to change it to be a chocolate buttercream, by adding in 1/4 cup of melted chocolate instead of the coffee and the alcohol. I also decided to add some lemon zest to the genoise. I was also going to brush the genoise with lemon juice before assembling it, but I forgot (it still has a lemony taste, though, with just the zest, so that’s good).
As things went on, I started to be nervous about the buttercream. It seems that a few people had theirs curdle, some multiple times! Ironically enough, that was the only one of the three parts that went perfectly when I made it.
The first thing was to go to Hannam supermarket to get all the ingredients. I was out of unsalted butter, cake flour and icing sugar. Hannam supermarket is the overpriced market way across town where they have foreign food things like unsalted butter and cake flour. At the little tiny market just outside, I saw a small thing of cream of tartar. I let out an audible gasp. I am such a geek. Then the next thing after that was to stop by GS Mart, a non-overpriced market for all the ordinary stuff (eggs, flour, etc).
Finally I got back and was ready to start baking. I started with the buttercream because I was so nervous about it. I started getting together all my ingredients. Butter.. check. Chocolate.. check. A cup of sugar.. and guess what? I was nearly out of sugar and after all that shopping, I had forgotten it. So I ran out again, this time to the little mart near my place to buy some. Sigh. After that, though, the buttercream was uneventful. It worked like a charm, and I put it in the fridge with a sigh of relief and started on the genoise. I thought I’d done the hardest part.
Buttercream ingredients, including some very room-temperature butter. Moooosh.
Mmmm. Chocolate buttercream.
The genoise flopped. I don’t know why, but it wouldn’t fluff up properly. It was just a total flop. I decided to try and bake it anyway, but I knew that it wouldn’t come out alright. Well, here’s the proof:
First attempt at the genoise: failure.
I gave up for the day and went out dancing instead. Since I had the Seoul veggie club coming for a potluck at 5pm the next day, I figured I’d wake up early and redo it. If it didn’t work, I’d just give up; no way I’d have time again later on to get the challenge done on time. Luckily it worked the second time. I have no idea what I did differently, but it was fluffing up almost right away this time. Actually, it still wasn’t perfect. I think that even though I left it in less time than was written, I still overcooked it; it cracked slightly when rolling it (despite trying to use the trick of rolling it once while still hot and unrolling it to cool). I also think it could have been lighter.
Assembled yule logs.
I dusted them with icing sugar, because I miss snow.
Then it was time to do the mushrooms, and I did the stupidest most classic mistake ever in the realm of baking. I looked quickly, and it said preheat oven to 220… and so I did and got back to what I was doing, without realizing that it said 220 Fahrenheit, and my oven uses Celcius. Yeah, so it burnt, and I didn’t get why, and I didn’t have time so I just tossed out the rest.. and then suddenly realized why.
Meringue mushrooms: more failure.
After banging my head against the wall several times, I scraped enough of the meringue mixture from the side of the uncleaned bowl to make one mushroom, which I cooked in my toaster oven. It came out quite well. So finally even that was alright.
My one beautiful mushoom.
Finished challenge!
The taste is pretty good, and it was good as a challenge, but not something I’d do again, I think. Or at least if so, not very often, and I might try modifying things a bit. Overall, I was not super happy with it (I set high standards for myself sometimes; it was a lovely amateur log, but too many problems along the way (cracked genoise, one meringue due to complete baking stupidity, etc) to really be happy. I wasn’t unhappy with the result either, though, so overall it was good. It was great as a challenge, though, and people really liked eating it. So thanks again to Lis and Yvonne for hosting this month. Check out everyone else’s yule logs at the Daring Bakers blogroll.
