Merry Christmas cake!

Buche de Noel

Second to last cake and I am out of key ingredients for the planned cake: melting chocolate and powdered sugar. At least I have butter. Normally I would either pick a different cake or run to the store. However, it is Christmas day so the stores are all closed and THIS is the Christmas cake I have planned.

Meringue mushrooms are already hardened and pearl sugar is waiting to make complete the snow flaked scene. What’s a girl to do? Chef Google tells me that my high powered blender or food processor will make powdered sugar and I already know that I can adjust for the melted chocolate with cocoa melted into sugar.

I can do this, I can do this. But first, I shall take a Christmas Day walk in the woods with my family.

It was a different sort of Christmas- we celebrated earlier in the week with my family in Wisconsin, so it was a fairly quiet, super relaxed, and non-snowy day at home.

For dinner we had meatballs (homemade, thank you Aunt Jan) with ostkaka, mashed potatoes (both sweet and white) and we tried something new: Cuban style Rice & Beans (Moros y Cristianos)… more on the rice and beans project for 2016 is forthcoming but this was our start.

And for that cake. After last month’s Pumpkin Roll went so smoothly, I did not hesitate to try making this chocolate roulade. However, it went totally different and was a big mess. I also learned that powdered sugar can be made in a vitamix but the stuff that I put through the food processor was certainly not smooth enough. Lesson learned. Spoiler: we still ate all the leftover frosting. (By leftover I mean that I might have made a double batch of frosting from the start.)

So the cake itself was not pretty, no one will ever know because this while swill cake roll was covered in chocolate buttercream frosting, twined with a fork to look like a log.

We (along with my Cousin Joyce) would probably have eaten the entire thing but I thought ahead and saved a piece for my friend Allison to try (who happened to be in town, win).

Next time, I will make sure to have all the ingredients ready and would probably start with a different chocolate roulade recipe. Still, it was delicious.