Buche de Noel part two

[louiselux]

Ta da! Thanks for all the advice and recipes!





The sadness of only having a hand whisk shines through in this picture, I think.


There must be a better way to make a ganache, for god's sake. Processing chocolate and pouring in boiling cream is MESSY. It turned out wonderfuly smooth and rich though.


The cake base just out of the oven. It's flourless, made with six eggs, cocoa and sugar. I cooked it for 20 minutes


The cake base shrinks down quite a bit, but I still ended up shaving a small layer off as I was worried it was going to be too thick to roll.


Base covered in about 230g whipped cream. The cream has 1/4 tsp of vanilla essence and 13g of caster sugar added


The cake base cracked as I rolled it but it was eventually hidden by the ganache. It was possible to squish the base quite a bit, as it was quite moist. It'd be a mistake to overcook the base and make it too dry.


Creating the branches for the sides. I used cream to weld them on.


Halfway through covering it with the ganache and I'm feeling a bit tense. Can I really pull this off? I tried to keep the coating as thin as possible, as it was very rich and I didn't want it to overpower the cake.


Time for me to make and eat a mini version from the shaved off bits and scraps of cream. Yum!


The finished cake. I have to say I'm really pleased with how it came out. The cake base was moist and not too sweet, and the filling was also not very sweet. The vanilla essence gave it a rich, ice-creamy flavour. I made the wood effect by dragging a fork through the smoothed down ganache. Then dusted with icing sugar. The holly leaves are from the garden. There wasn't time before the party to make little mushrooms, which I was quite sad about.


Nother angle


The cake about to be eaten!


The End

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[aqua-eyes.livejournal.com]

Yum!