Female Speaker: Here is our finished chocolate génoise. You can see it's nice and puffy, and I realized I didn't tell you other than baking it for 10-12 minutes how you can tell that it's done. If you press on it, it bounces back. And again, I know I sound like a broken record but don't over-bake it, because you are going to see how we are going to manipulate this, and the cake needs to be pliable.
So, here I have what I am going to put on the inside and the outside of my Bûch de Noël. It is Swiss Meringue buttercream and it's been flavored with espresso. Espresso powder, that's been dissolved in hot water. And it's really very nice, I like the combination of the coffee and the chocolate because it's not too sweet. But you can put anything. People get really creative, you can first put a layer of jam and then put chocolate ganache with cream and how easy could that be, just whip some cream and put it on in and roll it up. But I chose this today and let's go up the sheet.
Now, once this was done, I let it cool completely, and once it was cool I flipped it out onto a sheet pan, the back of a sheet, a clean sheet pan and peeled off the paper. On that sheet pan, there was a piece of parchment paper, you can do that or you can do it just on a sheet pan. And then once the paper was peeled off, I put a clean piece of parchment paper on the back of the génoise and flipped it out. So now, it's right side up and it has clean paper underneath it. With this batch of buttercream I find that about half of it ends up in itself.
You don't have to go all the way to the edges, because we are going to trim them a little. Go on waste all my good buttercream. You can put anything in the buttercream, and actually I mean if you want you can put vanilla extract. Often when you do things with the strawberry jam, you'll flavor it with like an eaux de vie or something like that.
Again, let your imagination run wild. Now, the fun begins, we are going to roll our cake. Sometimes you'll see in recipes that they say to roll it from the short end. I prefer to do it from the long end because then you get a longer cake.
Using the paper as a guide it's really quite easy, fold over the edge, it's a little step the first turn but then you'll see it sort of starts to form. Okay, there you go. And as you go along move it up, to keep it round try not to get all the butter cream out like I just did and switching along and I am just going to flip it over so it's entirely covered.
You see this in here the seam, when you serve it you are going to want to have the seam down. So wrap this back up, smooth it up, make it as tight as you can and then - making a lot of noise, look like a big piece of toffee just turn the edges.
Now, you can put this in the fridge so it sets up, the buttercream, the shape everything for a couple of hours but I am in a bit of a hurry so I am going to put it in the freezer for an hour, then we are going to take it out and decorate it so it looks like the Bûch de Noël, see it in about an hour.
Here is our rolled cake, it was wrapped in parchment paper, put in the freezer for about an hour, and now I have unwrapped it, and I want to show you how to prepare it to have it look like our Bûch de Noël.
Using a serrated knife, I recommend that because you don't squish the cake, you are able to keep it clean and straight. I am going to trim off the edges. Nice little circle, scraps for it, I'll cut off the other end.
Okay. Now from -- actually I am going to go back. This is going to be one of the ends, it looks nicer if you have it on a bias, there you go. Okay, now from this end I am going to cut a larger piece, say about an inch, inch-and-a-half, again on the diagonal. And this is going to go two-thirds or so, on the log and whatever it is that you are coating the log with has to act like the cement, and buttercream is great for that. So let me put a little bit on all over. So I want to demonstrate for you how it is you get it to look like a log.
A little buttercream on the bottom of this piece and we are going to put it off center, how is that? So with that in place I am going to go behind here, right at where the two pieces meet, just slap it on, you can smooth it out and have it be a little lovely later. First thing is you have to get this to stay.
Using a fork, the tines of the fork, you can make lines, you can make them be squiggly sort of lines, you can criss-cross them a little, whatever you like, to make it look like a tree. Now, it's very traditional is to have little mushrooms around it, made out of meringue, where you probably make just a simple meringue and you pipe out a little column and then you pipe out a little ball and after they are baked you put them together and you make this cute little mushroom.
I have decided to make some mushrooms and some holly leaves, but I made them out of my marzipan and I have had a lot of requests about marzipan making fruit and things out of it. So rest assured we are going to have a show about that. But I wanted to show you at least some of it, how it's done.
And here is our finished Bûch de Noël. I have marked up the buttercream with the tines of a fork like I demonstrated earlier. I have dusted the plate and the log with a little powdered sugar, so it looks like snow. And here I have made -- out of marzipan I have made holly leaves and berries and some mushrooms.
On behalf of the Dyann Bakes team, we'd like to wish you happy holidays and healthy New Year.
Announcer: If you have a question you'd like to answer this part of our show, drop us a note on dyannbakes.com, we would love to hear from you.
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