The Bûche de Noël: Alice Medrich's Christmas Log

Assembling the great Bûche...

After I made the double recipe of bittersweet chocolate truffle mouse, the Bûche recipe says to line a jelly-roll pan (just a baking pan with rims) with aluminum foil, like I had done for the Chocolate Soufflé pastry (see previous post), and freeze until firm. Now a little bit of arts and crafts...

Using the foil liner at one end of the pan you fold 2 inches of the frozen mousse over itself. Press on the foil to flatten it. Then peel back that part of the foil. Miraculously this didn't ruin the shape of the mousse. The doubled-over section will be the centre part of the mousse spiral of the Bûche. Oh Alice, so smart.

Then lift the soufflé pastry in parchment paper from its pan and place it pastry-side down (flip it) over the mousse. Don't worry. It WILL stick to the paper. It's just nerve-wracking flipping anything...It should line up with the mousse pan, not the folded end of the mousse. Then peel the paper from the soufflé. I got so nervous at this point that I neglected to sieve cocoa over the pastry, but I did remember to cover it with a sheet of foil. It would have been a disaster if I'd tried to flip it over without the foil. With help(!) hold the foiled pan at both ends and flip it onto the counter. So much flipping...Now the pastry is on the bottom, topped by the mousse. Then peel the top layer of foil off the frozen mousse. It actually peels well! If it's not frozen enough it will stick to the foil and, again, mousse soup will be created. Oh, it'll also just ooze right out of the buche once it's rolled, which is the step we're getting to right now:

Turn the foil so the side with 2 inches of exposed pastry is opposite you, and use the foil to help roll the pastry and mousse into a log starting from the unexposed side. Wrap the roll with foil and return to the freezer.

Well, that all sounds simple, right? Really it isn't so bad if you don't lolligag before flipping the mousse, and as long as it's not a furnace in your kitchen. Fortunately(?) Christmas in Canada is cold. Mousse stays mousse-y longer. Basically the only reason to like cold winters...skating is overrated.

Now the bûche was actually looking like a bûche and it was so beautiful. Kind of like when you can't see how something could ever really come together and it does. Any kind of work of art into which you put so much time and effort. Everything rolled pretty nicely, the pastry only crushed the mousse a little, and the pan fit perfectly into the freezer.

Just one more meringue to go...the next day. The pressure was on. An actual culinary student stood looking over my shoulder as, yet one more time, I attempted to not scramble egg whites. He didn't say anything. That's good, right? I was pretty determined. I even had the oven preheating to 425 degrees for the baking. I whisked, checked the temperature, thought it was good enough, and beat to stiff peaks.

I got the bûche out of the freezer and managed to transfer it to a piece of foil-wrapped cardboard, as the recipe suggests, without knocking the whole thing over. Then I covered it all, sides included, in meringue, making sure it touched the cardboard at the base. I skipped the "texture like tree bark" step in favour of not pushing my luck, and popped it into the preheated oven. I didn't want to stick it back in the freezer for fear of something bad happening to the meringue, or the whole thing sliding onto packages of frozen herbs, berries and peas...

I forgot to sieve powdered sugar on top before putting it into the oven, so I risked burning by sticking an arm with a sieve into the oven to make sure I got everything right. I baked it for 6 minutes (choosing the longest recommended time because I'd opened the oven door for so long to sieve the powdered sugar).

Oh my God it was beautiful. A little chocolate had escaped at one end, but I cut from that end first and once it was gone...spirals are amazing things. I just wanted to keep cutting slices off that bûche to see how beautiful the inside was. I mean, it just looks like a big cylindar of meringue, but inside there's a nicely packaged present of soufflé and mousse all wrapped up around each other. You need to eat this right away to get the hot taste of meringue on the outside and the cold taste of rich, frozen mousse on the inside. It's all so light and fluffy, but creamy and decadent. This is by far the most amazing thing (dessert, meal, recipe) I've ever made.

Would I make it again? Yes! For a VERY special occasion.

Was it everything I hoped it would be? Besides the escaping mousse and how quickly it thawed and spread (started as a circle, turned into an oval....turned into an elongated oval...), this was the most beautiful kitchen creation in the history of my kitchens, of which there have been 7. 7 kitchens I mean. That's a lot of creations.

What an incredible recipe...thank you, Alice Medrich.