I won’t lie. When I saw this recipe, all 18 pages of it I wasn’t happy. I may have even sworn. December is a busy enough time as it is without making a dish that has 6 elements to it. There was absolutely no way I could make this before Christmas with my packed schedule so I shelved this for a New Year’s Eve celebration. A few days before NYE I made it with some help from Angela from A Spoonful of Sugar who coaxed me off the window ledge so to speak. She also gave me the inspiration for the Ispahan themed buche.

I should have taken the opt out option for this one in hindsight but the idea of an Ispahan buche was too tempting. What I didn’t count on was the mousse part, usually a fairly easy item to make causing a lot of trouble. I used the 1/3 cup specified and it turned into something like scrambled eggs. I then asked on the website and someone else said that 1/3 of a cup worked fine but I just can’t see how what I had would have worked in any way. I made another version of the ganache but I don’t think this was ideal so I can’t comment on the ganache insert recipe below as I didn’t try it.

Another element that I had trouble with was the icing. I didn’t have any gelatine leaves left (and I certainly wasn’t in the mood to track down some more) so I wasn’t sure how to follow the recipe to use powder even though the recipe specified that powder could be used. I dissolved the gelatine into the almost boiling milk and glucose syrup (I didn’t want to dissolve it in water in case it introduced too much water into the icing) but by the time the gelatine powder had dissolved, the milky mixture was too cold to melt the chocolate and butter so it had to go back on the stove. I also waited until it coated the back of a spoon but it was still too runny then too.

Then there was the drama about the acetate, I wanted a dome shaped buche so I read that you simply line the loaf tin with the acetate and that’s all you need to do. Apparently not, as mine turned out as a loaf shape and whilst I tried lining the sides, some mousse seeped out (as well as some raspberry puree). This was exacerbated by the mousse being runnier than normal as I’d tried to save it from the recipe error before.

Would I recommend making it? Sadly, probably not. Well I think most of the elements are delicious by themselves, especially the feuillete which I could happily eat by itself in bucketloads but the overall production was it was far too stressful for me to wholeheartedly recommend, especially if you don’t have the help of a dishwasher (I did 6 sinkfuls of dishes for this). However it is spectacular looking I will admit (well other people’s buches are anyway) so I’d save this for when you a) have 2 days in which to prepare it and b) when you have someone helping you out. And when you have a lot of patience. A few days after I tried this and I found that when thawed, the log was divine, ambrosial, perfection. So does this mean there’s another version coming up next year? Who knows…time has a way of dulling memories

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I was asked by my mother to whip up something for a Christmas event with her friends at short notice. It’s not ordinarily how I like to do things – I prefer to pore over books and recipes and narrow down a selection and then judge each on their merits and suitability for the recipients. But as serendipity often occurs, I received an early Christmas present from my husband of the book Nigella Christmas and the Yule Log was one of the first things I saw that caught my eye.

I often dismiss Yule Logs thinking that they’ll be too hard to make and fiddly. They’re something of a craze around Christmas and indeed I saw a Japanese magazine featuring some being sold in Tokyo for Y5000+ ($70AUD or thereabouts) so I summarily dismissed it as a “hard to do” item. That was until I stopped and actually read the recipe. For all of its visual splendour, it’s just like a regular cake with a batter and icing and that is it. The key is in the decoration but even that can be faked, indeed a shaky or uncoordinated hand is best at making the tree-like squiggles and if I know anything about myself, it’s that I’m uncoordinated.

As I’m a slave to styling and wanted to give it a “just found in the forest” look, I sent my husband off in search of pine cones or similar pieces of nature. I would’ve just gone to a Department Store to buy some gold sprayed ones but no, the nature loving man looked out out kitchen window at the trees below and spotted a suitable tree and gathered up these little pieces of nature and another potential Christmas disaster was averted.

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Around Christmas time, I have noticed that I tend to gravitate towards rubied red items. And this one has been a long time in the making. When we were small, my mother had a very, very thick cookbook tome full of all sorts of retro delights as well as classic dishes. Even when young, we’d be fascinated by these dishes. My mother would rarely cook them as my Father would only eat food from his Mother country and my sister and I would be left to flick through the glossy thick book, the spine wearing away to nothing but cotton threads from many trips on and off the bookshelf.

Sour cherries

The one items I always looked at longingly was a huge Cherries Jubilee set in a jelly mould (this was probably a nod to retro where everything was jellified). My father at the time worked for Davis Gelatine yet it was wasted on me as I didn’t like jelly at all. They’d always try and ply us with the company dessert only to have me turning my nose at it. Until I married a jelly freak. If you’ve ever wondered who buys those freakishly blue tubs of jelly from the supermarket may I offer you my husband.

Gelatine sheets

I saw a similar jelly in a picture in a while back and showed it to my husband. His eyes widened in anticipation and I knew that he would appreciate this.The timing was right, it was close to Christmas and for those of you who want to use real cherries, they’re in season now in Australia. You could eliminate all of the palaver with the 20 gelatine sheets by buying the required 5 packets of cherry jelly (and why not if you’re busy).

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