Holiday Chocolate Yule Log

Hi, I'm Heather Bertinetti for eHow.com. Today, let's make one of the most traditional Christmas desserts from France, the Yule Log. So, let's get started. So here we have our egg yolks. We'll drop those in our mixer with our whisk attachment and now we're going to start whipping this. We're going to do a fairly high speed with half a cup of sugar. This is going to get light in color and it will get fluffy and thick. Now you can already see that the color is changing into this thick light yellow mess. That should about do it. So we're going to take this off and we're just going to pour that in to this egg yolk mixture I can add my cocoa powder, my flour and my salt. And with my spatula, starting from the middle, working out, I'm just going to fold that in. It's going to look really dry and that's totally fine because now we have to whip our whites and that will finish incorporating it all together. And we're going to pour in our egg whites. We're going to start this on a medium speed and we're going to slowly add in our sugar and we can dump all of our cream of tartar in as well. Cream of tartar just stabilizes the egg whites. We're going to kick our speed up a bit and slowly add in more sugar. Alright so our whites have come to a stiff peak, going to turn them down and we're going to take these off the mixer and here's the trick now. We have to incorporate, whisking vigorously, one third of the total meringue into the yolk cocoa powder mixture. So we're just going to whisk that in. Now, we can add the rest of our meringue. So now using my whisk, I'm just going to start from the middle and work my way out and incorporate all of the meringue. And that's it. So now that our batter is all incorporated we're ready to spread it onto our cookie sheet. So here I have a half sheet pan. It's about the regular size of a cookie sheet. With my vegetable oil spray, spray an X around and get all the edges so this sits flat, so the paper adheres to the bottom of the sheet pan and it will sit fat and then lightly coat the top. So now we can pour our batter in, right in the center. Be sure and try to get all of that in, spread this out to the edges like so and this is going to be a nice beautiful thin sponge cake layer. I'm going to show you a little later after we bake this off, how to roll it. Right now we're going to stick this in the oven at 350 degrees for about eight minutes. So guys, while our cake is baking for a Yule Log in the oven, we're going to make our filling. This is just the regular mocha butter cream. So to get started I have some instant expresso here that I'm going to dissolve in a little bit of rum. That is stirred, perfect. Now over what's called a double boiler we have our egg whites here and we're going to add our sugar. So just whisk our egg whites and sugar together so that it gets to the proper temperature where it pasteurizes our egg whites. So constantly whisk it because we don't want to make an omelet here and all that sugar should dissolve. Now that our egg whites feel hot to the touch, so we know they are pasteurized and our sugar is completely dissolved, you can remove this from the double boiler and we're going to pour it onto our mixer. Now we're just going to whip this until it's cool. You can turn it on the highest speed and you can feel with your hand the bottom of the bowl and when it doesn't feel so hot any more we can start phase two of the butter cream. So now that our meringue has cooled, we're going to turn this off. We're going to take our whip attachment off and we're going to switch to the paddle. At this stage we want to beat in our butter, so put that on, take our amazing luscious butter here and we're going to turn this back and beat. Slowly we're going to stream in our expresso and rum. Now at this point it can look a little soupy. That's okay because we're going to stick it in the refrigerator for about ten minutes. Okay guys, so now that our cake is out of the oven and it's cooled down, I've just popped it out on a little bit of 10X sugar or confectionery sugar onto a full sheet size parchment paper. This is very key okay? I'll show you why in a second. We're going to go back to our butter cream filling that we've made before, put a little dollop in there and just spread it to the outer edge leaving about an inch to a half an inch of border just cake. So now that all of our filling is spread out to the edges, we are going to set this aside. Now I'm going to turn this vertically. We're going to have the shorter side of the rectangle here facing myself and using the paper, I'm going to fold it over on itself, about an inch and a half fold, just start it. If it starts to stick it's okay and just slowly tear the parchment back like so. The first part is always sticky, so, then we'll give it another fold. Bring our paper back, another fold. Now the last edge roll over and pull back. And this we're going to transfer onto the sheet here. So now because most Yule Logs have a little bit of a stub on top and we want to make this as realistic as possible, I'm just going to cut a little bit of the end on an angle off and we're going to end up sticking that on an angle up top just like so. We're just going to icing this Yule Log, start with a little icing on top, on top of there too. It's kind of okay to be messy with this part, just in this step because later on we're going to take a fork and we're going to make it look like bark or wood and I'll show you how to do that. Just take a regular fork and you can start with the top and just run the fork down and then swipe off on the edge. So that's it guys, there's our Yule Log. How easy was that? Can you believe that you can make this at home. I'm Heather Bertinetti. Catch me again next time on eHow.com.