punge: December 2012

Chrimbob!
Ahh, I do love Christmas, the spices, the family time, the cosy. All lovely.

For the past few years I've meant to make a yule log, but as Christmas got closer, I somehow managed to forget. This year I've remembered, but I've also remembered something which will come across as a bit of a confession: I don't like chocolate cake. Sacrilegious I know, but in general I find chocolate cakes disappointing - too often it doesn't taste of chocolate, and can be incredibly dry, relying far too heavily on an over-rich frosting for the taste and the moisture. Even then, to me it just tastes of "sweet", not choc.

So rather than make a traditional chocolatey choccy choccy yule log I decided to make a Stollen-inspired log. For those of you that don't know Stollen, it's a yeast-based fruit bread/cake, often laced with marzipan, which originates from Germany and is the epitome of Christmas-in-your-mouth as far as I'm concerned. I paired it with a variation of the buttercream I made for the warm spice cake, which was chai-inspired, only this time without the tea, which seemed Christmassy as it's full of cloves, ginger and cinnamon, and also a pinch of pepper.

Here it is, a marzipan-laced no-flour swiss roll/roulade with Stollen fruit and a smells-like-christmas (and, interestingly, chai latte) buttercream. Enjoy!

Lydia's Stollen-Inspired Yule Log - serves about 16
If you want a 1 swiss-roll tin amount for 8ish people, halve the quantities and bake for 20 minutes
Ingredients
Roll
12 eggs, separated
300g (1 1/3 cup) caster sugar
100g (1 scant cup) ground almonds
2 tsp vanilla extract
50g (2 oz) glacé cherries (about 8 cherries), chopped,
100g (4 oz) mixed peel
or substitute the cherries and peel for a dried fruit mix with sultanas and mixed peel

Filling
650g (23oz) marzipan
375g (scant 2 cups confectioner's sugar) icing sugar plus extra for dusting
250g (2 1/4 sticks, 9oz) unsalted butter, softened
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp ground ginger
1½ tsp ground cloves
1½ tsp ground black pepper - it should still look flecky and black, not so finely ground that it's brown - if you only have finely ground pepper, use about ½ to 2/3 of the amount stated here.
pinch of ground star anise (optional)
1 tsp vanilla extract

You'll also need 2 swiss roll tins (about 30 x 20cm - 12 x 8 inches) , or one 30 x 30cm square tin for the 16-serving amount.

Method
Preheat the oven to 170°C (375°F, Gas Mark 3) and line a 30x30cm square tin, or 2 swiss roll tins with baking parchment.

Clean your whisk and bowl thoroughly to ensure no fat is present (which will stop the egg whites from foaming properly) - I usually do this by swilling boiling water in the bowl and over the whisk attachments, but you can also rub a sliced lemon over the surface, then dry with a clean towel.

Whisk the egg whites until very light and fluffy, then add 100g (just under half a cup) of the sugar while whisking. Continue whisking just until you have peaks that can stand alone.

Whisk the yolks with the remaining sugar until very light, fluffy and foamy, then fold in the almonds, vanilla extract, fruit and about a quarter of the egg white mixture.

Fold in the remaining egg white mixture delicately, in about 3 batches, being careful not to beat out the air you've incorporated. Pour into the prepared tin(s) and smooth into the corners.

Bake for 25-30 minutes in the large square tin or (20-25 minutes in swiss roll tins) until golden and springy, and a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Leave in the tin for about 5 minutes then turn out onto baking parchment dusted well with icing sugar, gently peel off the parchment the cake was cooked on, and cover the cake with a clean towel.

To make the buttercream, cream the butter with the sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the spices and vanilla extract, along with 2 tbsp water to help lighten the mixture a little.

To assemble the log, when cooled, trim the edges off the cake and spread with a thin layer of buttercream.

Separate 150g (about 5oz) of marzipan from the rest and set aside. Roll out the rest of the marzipan to form a sheet and place on top of the buttercream layer.

If using swiss roll tins, turn the cakes so the short sides are closest to you (and you're looking at the cakes in portrait orientation) - if you're doing a half batch using only 1 tin, lay the cake so a long side is closest to you, landscape orientation.

Roll the remaining marzipan to a sausage shape the length/width of your cake (short side if you've used 2 swiss roll tins with 75g (about 2.5oz) marzipan per 1 tin's-worth of cake, long side if you're making a half-batch with 1 swiss roll tin) and lay on the cake closest to the edge facing you. When rolled up, this will form a marzipan core.

To make the roll, fold the cake edge closest to you, away from you, using the marzipan sausage as leverage. Using the baking parchment, tightly roll the cake away from you and when you get to the end, firmly squeeze it to help it keep it's shape.

If using 2 tins, join the ends of your two rolls together with buttercream to form one long roll.

Cut the last third off your log at roughly a 60° angle, place the log on your serving plate with the seam on the bottom, and join the cut third to the main log about half way up, using buttercream on the angled, cut portion, to form a branch. I also cut a chunk off the main log near where the previous cut was made and turned it round so the branch end was straight again, but this is not really necessary.

Cover with the remaining buttercream and score bark shapes and tree-rings into it using the blunt edge of a butter knife, or a knitting needle.

Top with a dusting of icing sugar, and place in the fridge to set nicely until munch-time.

I’ve been working on a cake for some friends of ours whose son turns one in a few weeks. His name is Noah, and what cuter way to celebrate with a Noah’s Ark cake? I was thrilled to be asked to make one for them, I’ve always wanted a good reason to have a go at this much-loved theme, and there are some amazing versions out there! (like this one from "make me studio", also for a first birthday, and this phenomenal one, made for the threadless tees 2009 cake contest). I didn’t want to go down the fondant-covered boat route, as though it looks very very cute, shaping fondant around an awkward shape isn’t something I’ve had that much practice with, and in my experience, if not done perfectly, it can look very shoddy indeed. Also, in my experience (well, at any rate, my mum always did this, not that I was hyper or anything…), parents don’t like their kids to eat too much fondant, so the fondant gets taken off and left, and I hate (expensive) waste, so butter cream it was, with a relatively simple ark shape and animals made out of fondant and/or marzipan, with a few quirks thrown in. Noah’s dad is about as much of a geek as Nick is, and so I had planned to put lots of cute sci-fi tid-bits in there, but the problem with daleks and Cthulu is that they tend to be detail-heavy and thus rather time consuming. So I settled for some waterskiing penguins and some angry birds.

This cake was designed to “feed” 24-30 people, but I have to say it’ll be tight, with quite small pieces each. Which is probably just as well as the recipe I used turned out a rather dense, very moist banana cake with some incredibly sweet toffee butter cream. Yep, banoffee cake, courtesy of Fiona Cairn’s “The Birthday Cake Book”. If I could do it all again, I’d have chosen a cake that rises more and have a full round cake under the ark portion, but realising this at 8pm on the Sunday of delivery, when there’s no more butter in the house, is the most hopeless time for action.

I used 3 times the recipe quantity for one cake, and baked it in a 30cm x 30cm tin (the full size of the Silverwood multisize foldaway cake pan) adding 15-or-so minutes to the baking time, but doing it in several round tins and sticking with the original timings will work just as well, if not slightly better. If you make it with a different recipe (pretty much any other recipe – banana cake is notoriously dense and doesn’t rise very much) then these quantities of cake should easily be enough for 30 people, in my opinion.

I wanted quite a lot of butter cream and cake layers so I cut the cake into 2 layers and sandwiched them back together with the butter cream. I then cut 10cm off one end of the cake for the top of the ark and cut the remaining block in half to give two 20x15cm rectangles and carved both into a basic boat/ark shape. I sandwiched one ark shape to the other with more butter cream, to give a basic boat shape with four cake layers, and carved them so that the bottom of the boat was narrower than the top. I then trimmed half of the 10cm off-cut to fit comfortably as the boxy cabin on top of the boat shape, and covered the remaining off-cut with butter cream as an additional, “behind the scenes” cake for serving. This is one of my gripes with character cakes – I’m not good at carving shapes without wasting a massive amount of cake! The ark was affixed to a cake drum, and the cake drum to a plate, both with a good blob of butter cream.

To the rest of the butter cream I added an inordinate amount of cocoa powder and a smidge of black food colouring paste to get a dark wood colour. The ark was then coated in three layers of butter cream, with a good half hour to an hour in the fridge between each layer, and finally smoothing the whole thing off with a wet palette knife. Using the blunt side of a butter knife and virtually no pressure, I then scored lines along the surface of the whole ark for wood panels, and, using a toothpick, scored rivet holes at what would be the joints of the panels.

For the water, I whipped up a quick batch up butter cream (80g unsalted butter at room temperature whipped with 160g sieved icing sugar until light and fluffy), coloured it with blue food colouring paste, applied it around the boat and over the edges of the cake drum. And finally spent a good few hours rolling animal shapes out of fondant/marzipan coloured with food colouring paste, fixing any “bits” of animals to other bits (e.g. the elephant ears to the elephant head, or the orange spots to the yellow giraffe-head) using water, and affixing the characters to the ark either by pressing them into the butter cream (one of the advantages of a butter cream covered cake), or with the aid of a wooden skewer/dowel for the giraffe and elephant heads. The water-ski-rope for the penguins is a chopped skewer pushed into the cake, and the skewer for the water-ski handle is pushed into (ouch!) the penguin wings for balance.

For a final touch, I cut out a thinly-rolled rectangle of icing for a number plate, wrote on it using an edible-ink decorating pen (with which I also did the animal’s eyes), and stuck it to the back of the boat with a little water.

Tah-dah!

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stollen-inspired yule log

Noah's First Ark