Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
Ruth and I have been making a yule log or two every December for three years now, and this year we made by far the best yet. I just want to get down links to the recipes we used, along with a few thoughts.
For this yule log, I used:
- This jelly roll cake
- This whipped cream recipe
- The buttercream recipe on page 348 of this book
- These assembly directions
I probably won’t use the same buttercream recipe again. It came out kind of weird — sort of dry and brittle. It still tasted great, and the texture actually resembled the bark on a log in a nice way, but it was a real pain to spread and it had a tendency to fall off of slices of the cake in chunks. Fortunately, I got a copy of The Professional Chef for Christmas, and it’s got very detailed directions for making a better buttercream.
Also, I’ve done several different things with the filling of different yule logs, but this whipped cream is everyone’s favorite. The fact that it’s so fluffy makes the log look great, and makes rolling it less stressful. It also tastes delicious.
Pictures of our awesome, if diminutive, Christmas tree. We probably won’t be sending out cards this year, but we hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season, and gets to spend as much time as possible with their favorite friends and family.
Our few pictures of Thanksgiving are online. We started the day lying around, as here with Ruth’s monster of a cat. Eventually we got around to cooking, and made praline pumpkin pie (recipe), pumpkin crumble (recipe; Ruth makes her own pumpkin butter, rather than using a jar), fried okra (recipe), and buttermilk biscuits (recipe).
Then we went to our friend Kristina’s apartment, and had dinner with a ton of cool folks. Kenny made a great turkey (seen above), and there was pomegranate sangria, and and a delicious time was had by all.
