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Christmastime Baking
This Christmas I thought I’d try my hand at the classic French desert, Bouche de Noel. I’m not going to lie, it was sort of a pain to make. My first trials were with the genoise (cake part,) because I don’t exactly own a jelly roll pan. So I “made” one out of aluminum foil and parchment paper. It actually worked ok.
The filling is chocolate mousse, which I’ve made a zillion times before, but this recipe was different than what I’m used too, and the results were not as “stiff” as I would have liked, and some of the filling oozed out of the roll. Chilling it for a long time was the solution, and really, once I iced it no one saw any of the cracks in the genoise or the mousse leaking through said cracks.
It’s iced with a plain chocolate ganache that I added some rum into for something a bit extra.
Making the meringue mushrooms was the easiest and most fun part, and they looked really convincing.
The bark was created by just melting down some semisweet chocolate and spreading it on a piece of parchment, letting it cool, and then rolling it – it flaked off very nicely
I also made an assortment of cookies this year. They look (to me) pretty impressive. These are mini black and white cookies, which TOTALLY rocked and tasted exactly like NYC black and whites, a soft vanilla cookie filled with raspberry filling, and harder chocolate cookies filled with a white chocolate cream and topped with a little bit of dark chocolate. All of them were really good, and didn’t stick around too long.
All of the cookie recipes came from Martha Stewart’s holiday cookie book, and the bouche recipe came from her website. I fully feel, after doing all of these recipes that Martha Stewart is crazy, AND her cookie yield isn’t quite accurate – if you make some of her recipes plan on having about 10 less cookies than she says you will.
Overall-I’m pretty impressed with myself! Happy New Year everyone!
