- Buche, Buche, Buche, Buche, Buche, Buche, Buche,
Buche de Noel.
Hey, everybody, my name's Elise Mayfield,
and this is Smart Cookie.
Today we are gonna be making a Buche de Noel.
What's a Buche de Noel?
Good question, everyone.
A Buche de Noel is like a roulade cake
that's decorated to look like a log.
And the basis of it is a traditional sponge cake recipe,
so sponge cake recipe is actually one of
the oldest cake recipes that we know of.
It's an Old English recipe.
So the first thing you're gonna wanna do is take your eggs
and you're gonna separate your eggs.
So these are just the egg yolks.
I have the egg whites in a separate bowl.
But we're gonna go ahead and get our egg yolk in a bowl.
We're gonna add some sugar.
It's about a third a cup of sugar.
We're just gonna mix this up until it's,
want it to be kind of light yellow and fluffy.
Kick it up a notch!
(mixer running loudly)
And now we're gonna add some water.
We're gonna add some vanilla in there.
You check your recipe,
and then you blend it a little bit more.
(mixer churning)
Great.
Okay.
Just a little dash of salt.
You don't need to measure it out.
Just give it a little pinch.
So we're just gonna do some cocoa.
I'm just gonna fold in the cocoa
to give it some chocolatey goodness.
We're also putting some almond flour in here.
This is super fine almond flour,
and we're gonna use cake flour.
Now, what's the difference between cake flour and AP flour?
Let me tell you.
Cake flour has corn starch blended into it,
so if you actually don't have any cake flour at home
and you wanna make a sponge cake,
you could actually make your own cake flour
by substituting in a couple tablespoons
of corn starch along with your AP flour.
Alright.
So this guy's gonna fly away for a second.
♪ Fly like an eagle ♪
♪ Put the beaters in the mixer ♪
Alright.
So these are our egg whites from our separated eggs,
and this is some cream of tartar.
Cream of tartar is an acid,
and it's gonna help us with some stability.
Okay.
Aw man.
Crap.
So I'm starting this off at a pretty low speed
and I'm gonna slowly add a third a cup of sugar.
Add it in so slow so that the sugar has time to dissolve
in with the egg whites while they're whipping.
So you can see my egg whites are starting to become bigger
and they're white.
Kicking it up a notch.
Lord, this takes forever.
(whistling)
Yeah!
So they're ready.
You can tell, like, look at those.
Just hanging out.
They're not going anywhere.
Okay.
So I'm bringing my chocolate base back
that had my egg yolks in it
and all of our flour.
I'm gonna add our egg whites in three additions
into our chocolate batter.
Oh yeah.
So you don't wanna stir it very fast.
You're kind of moving it around the bowl
and you're literally gonna kind of
tuck it into the other batter.
T-Rex says go slow.
And while I'm gently folding these in,
let's have a little story time, shall we?
Gather 'round, people on the Internet.
Let me tell you about the history of the Buche de Noel.
The Buche de Noel is traditionally a French dessert,
but it's based off of a very ancient pagan ritual
about celebrating the Yule log.
The ashes were supposed to represent the past year
in hopes that they would be prosperous the next year.
Somehow, in the history of things,
it went from an actual burning log to making a cake
that looked like a log that people ate.
So that is our Smart Cookie fact of the day.
Ding.
This is all combined.
Perfect.
♪ Slide it over ♪
♪ Get your pan ♪
Jelly roll pan, 15 by 10, very specific.
I'm gonna pour this batter evenly into it.
Oh, love, so glad you came over for Christmas.
I'm going to make a Buche de Noel.
Fantastic.
I'm gonna put it in the oven now.
375, 10 minutes.
Seriously, it only takes 10 minutes.
That's, like, super quick in cake world time.
(dinging) It's ready!
Okay.
Oh man, it smells chocolatey and delicious.
Here's what you are looking for with your sponge cake.
With my little finger I'm just gonna poke the top,
and you can see, it's spongy.
I'm gonna flop it out.
Oh boy.
It's, like, in my nose.
Everything's fine.
Ah!
Everything's fine!
Everything's fine.
Woo.
(woman muttering in the background)
Alright, so take your parchment off.
You're gonna use your towel to roll this up.
So I'm gonna kinda fold over,
and then I'm gonna use the ends of
this towel to roll this cake.
It's a little scary, 'cause you're like,
oh my God, is this cake gonna break?
But it's really not.
Like, it's super spongy right now.
But you have to do this while it's
super hot right out of the oven.
Lay it on the seam, cool the cake on a rack,
and you'll want it to completely cool for a half hour.
By the magic of television,
we made one of these yesterday.
Now hopefully it will have kept its shape.
Oh yeah.
Yes.
Nailed it, everyone.
So while it's still on the table,
I'm gonna go ahead and fill this with whipped frosting.
That's gonna be a little bit lighter,
a little easier to spread,
because I wanna avoid tearing my cake.
And I'm going all the way to the edges for this.
There's no reason to leave an edge.
All of the edges can be filled.
Now that we have frosted the center,
we're gonna roll this right back up into a little roulade.
Now, a roulade is just a roll.
You can do it with cake.
You can do it with steaks.
You can do it with chicken.
It just means something that's rolled
with something in the center.
Oh boy.
Perfecto.
So you're gonna lay your cake
seam-side down on your platter.
I think that this makes it really fun.
We are gonna decorate this cake
to look like a piece of wood.
So what I'm gonna do is cut a diagonal
piece of this cake off of the end.
Look at that.
It's like a giant Ho-Ho.
Y'all, it is like a giant Ho-Ho.
Great.
And then what I'm gonna do with this piece that
I have already rolled, I'm gonna stick it onto the side.
Look at that.
Do you see what I'm doing?
I'm making a log.
You know, it's like the knot on the side of a tree.
So now we just have to decorate it.
For the outside I'm going with
a good old classic chocolate frosting.
So we're just gonna start frosting a little bit.
I'm gonna give this little guy a little extra help.
Add a little extra frosting onto the side.
So now he's good and stuck on there.
And then we're just gonna gently frost this.
You still wanna kind of be gentle.
The sponge cake is delicate,
so you can't just kinda slap it on there.
You do have to have a little finesse.
Kinda starting to look like a log.
Now that we've frosted it,
I'm gonna use a fork to score this
to look a little bit more like bark.
Give it a little bit of texture.
You can add some curly waves in there.
And then on the ends I kinda like to do a little spiral.
What's going on?
Mmm, frosting.
So look at that.
Kinda looks like a tree, right?
Like, vaguely reminiscent of a tree.
Okay, let's add pistachios for moss.
Some green pistachios.
We'll just do a few here on the top.
A little bit of moss.
This is the extent of my adult decorations
because let me tell you what I found.
Hashtag not sponsored but could be.
Teddy Grahams.
Not only do they have the Teddys,
but look, there's little flowers,
and there's little butterflies,
and there's little bumblebees.
Even better, I went to our local Asian market
and I found these candies called Choco Boy.
They are little chocolate and cookie mushrooms.
Like, how perfect is that?
These we can just plant kind of around the edges.
Like, there's little mushrooms growing in your forests.
So cute.
Choco Boy.
Fantastique.
Okay, I think one of the most exciting
parts of this is to cut into it.
Oh yeah.
Buche de Noel!
And that is my recipe for a Buche de Noel.
I hope that you enjoyed our video
and that you might wanna make this yourself.
If you do, please like, comment, share, subscribe.
All those things.
Let me know how your recipe went.
I hope that you have an incredible holiday.
Happy holidays!
Ho ho ho!
Merry Christmas from Smart Cookie!