Go big or go home for Christmas night dessert, am I right? # 154: Tiramisu Bûche de Noël

Just a short post about this birch tree re-do cake I made for Christmas dinner last night! Mascarpone whipped cream with chocolate shards for the bark, filled with a chocolate sponge cake swirled with kahlua pastry cream and surrounded by pistachio moss and meringue mushrooms.

Back in 2015, I made my first yule log cake ever and being the proud cake mama that I was, I did a little photoshoot with it. Who knew there’d be so many dessert photoshoots in my future?! Here’s the OG birch tree:

It was a chocolate sponge cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and some sort of whipped cream filling. My attempts at meringue mushrooms spread out flat so I dusted them with cocoa powder and pretended they were shelf mushrooms.

As you can see, the frosting turned out a little grainy, but those flat mushrooms weren’t half bad!

The 2015 swirl was better, but the 2019 cake was fluffy and delicious, so no complaints here.

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This year, I ground some pistachios for a moss bed and glued my meringues together with dark chocolate. I kept to the classic cocoa powder dirt to make them look a lil more authentic. Such fun-gi(s), always the life of the party.

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I whipped up my favorite pastry cream recipe, but added kahlua and chopped dark chocolate. After it had set, I folded in some whipped cream to add some volume.

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This cake incorporated a dark chocolate ganache and smelled like chocolate heaven. Judging by my pictures, the 2015 edition used dutch-process cocoa to get the oreo-black effect. I had to whip mountains of air into the eggs for this batch, a total of almost 20 minutes of whipping in the stand mixer! Since I was using my mom’s stand mixer which she’s had (and heavily used) since college, I felt the need to apologize to it. It’s a terra cotta brown KitchenAid and isn’t phased by much.

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The lovely thing about yule log cakes, is that you can coat the entire outside in delicious frosting and no one needs to know about the huge cracks that betrayed you underneath. I waited about 10 minutes too long to roll it and it cracked in 3 places. Luckily I wasn’t going for a naked finish, so the mascarpone whipped cream worked it’s magic.

I went with the single log look, without additional branches. I think the squirrels approved. Next time I’ll need to try doing one with a ganache coating so I can make textured bark! Stay tuned for 2020.

Same platter, same idea, 4 years apart. Cheers!

Happy munching!

Cake recipe mostly from: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2019/12/chocolate-yule-log-recipe.html (warning: it is excessively wordy – if you can sort through all the unnecessary temperature and texture discussion, it’s got the bones of a great recipe! I used it for ingredient proportions.)