It was a Christmas wish.
My best high school friend called me a few weeks before the holiday and asked, "I've had this recipe for years, will you make this with me when I'm in town?"
This of course pulled at my heartstrings. Since I started a new job last year, I've been taking the time to reacquaint myself with my recipe book. Recipes I have collected for decades, I started making once again because working from home gives me flexibility to make meals for the family.
My friend told me about her special recipe for a Buche de Noel. This French sponge cake is served at Christmastime, is shaped like a log, and is filled with cream. It looks like a jelly roll. This cake represents the beloved Yule log which is part of Christmas traditions in Europe. As fireplaces became less commonplace, the cake became a way families could still incorporate the Yule log into their modern celebrations.
Back in 9th grade, when my friend and I first met, our French teacher told us the story about the Buche. I was so inspired by the story that I made my own and took it into class. My friend does not remember this and to be honest my memory is fuzzy as well, but nonetheless I was ready to revisit this French delicacy.
It was the day after Christmas when we decided to get together for our project. Unfortunately, my friend forgot her recipe back home in North Carolina, but with the power of Google, she was able to find a few that resembled her copy. I made sure I had all the ingredients and I was excited to begin. My dear friend is an excellent cook, so I was going to defer to her on any decision making. We were going to make two, so we would have one for each of our families.
We decided to take the sponge cake ingredients from one recipe and the filling from another. It was truly a scientific adventure. Since I have experience with making pumpkin rolls, I took the lead on doing that part of our project. But....the batter was very different from a pumpkin roll. We used six whipped egg whites, so the batter was fluffy and light. Very delicate. It was hard to tell when it was finished in the oven because I am used to a cakey cake, not a crackable mixture. This also created a huge obstacle when unrolling it from the jelly roll shape to add the filling. The cake was so delicate it cracked multiple times.
We joked because in France, a gourmet Buche de Noel can cost up to $200. We said we would charge $3.75, but we both knew once we added the filling and covered it with chocolate ganache, those would cover a multitude of sins. We also knew, after sampling each of the elements, that everything tasted amazing. Even if it didn't look good, it was going to taste super yummy.
My friend did her best to piece the cakes together. One of them turned out better than the other so we were able to have one good-looking cake and use the other one for the log branches. The chocolate ganache made the cakes look so beautiful and we were pleased with our results. Our charging price went up to $10.
We had no idea it was going to take a little over 4 hours from start to finish to have our final product. We had not spent this much time together, just the two of us, in years. Living ten hours away from each other surely limits our visits, but we truly had a wonderful time, and it was a great way to do something a little different during the holidays, that didn't involve the hustle and bustle.
*My blog is featured each week in the Valley Mirror as the On My Mind column. The paper serves the Steel Valley and Woodland Hills communities.*
