Yule log cake

Older Daughter decided she wanted to try making a yule log cake. She got the recipe here.

She mixed the dry ingredients...

...separate from the wet ingredients.

This is for the cake part.

Whipping egg whites.

Folding the egg whites into the mixture.

This is the part she wasn't sure about. She lined a tray with parchment paper, and poured the cake mixture to make a thin cake.

It baked beautifully.

The next tricky part was rolling the hot cake and then letting it cool.

While the cake cooled, she made the icing (ganache) that would go over it, starting with breaking up a bar of baking chocolate.

She added the chocolate to hot cream.

Then she whisked it until it was smooth.

Next was the filling, which consisted of whipped cream, mascarpone cheese, and a bit of powdered sugar for sweetener. (The filling was out-of-this-world delicious.)

When the cake was cool, she very carefully unrolled it...

...and spread it with the filling.

After this, the cake is re-rolled.

Not bad!

But wait, it gets better. The next step is to cut off a chunk of the end, at an angle.

The rough end is then "glued" with the ganache against the main part of the cake to make a "branch." (This is a yule log, after all.)

The ganache was thick and dry, almost crumbly, to resemble bark. It took some work to get it onto the cake roll.

After this, the ganache is kind of "scored," again to resemble tree bark.

She added a snippet of cedar, just to make it festive.

She said the one thing she did wrong was not to relocate the cake onto a platter before frosting it, since once it's frosted, it's almost impossible to move.

But other than that, it was a splendid first attempt. I'm not a huge chocolate fan, but even I thought this project was just delicious.

An excellent Christmas baking project. Next time, she said she might try making an "alder tree" by making a vanilla (instead of chocolate) cake. Yum!