Easy Yule Log – Christmas Bûche de Noël Cake [French]

Directions

1. 1
   Separate your egg yolks and egg whites, keep the egg whites at the side at first. First mix and beat your egg yolks with the sugar, vanilla sugar and all purpose flour until the content is almost light pastel yellow in color. Then beat your egg white stiff until you have a stiff snow. Test that the egg whites are stiff enough by turning the bowl with the snow upside down, the snow shouldn't fall out. Fold the egg whites carefully into the previously prepared egg yolk mixture. The aim should be that the mass remains fluffy to a certain extend and that the content is well incorporated. Don't mix the egg whites in but fold it in, this is important to keep the airiness in the mass! Preheat your oven to 200 Celsius/390 Fahrenheit.Keep a large rectangle baking tray ready with a baking sheet/parchment. Oil the baking sheet a bit with a kitchen brush.
2. 2
   Add the whole mass on the parchment and spread it out evenly with a baking spatula.
3. 3
   Bake the roulade dough for more or less 10 minutes golden brown at 200 Celsius/390 Fahrenheit. While the dough is baking prepare a syrup with the water, sugar and rum.
4. 4
   Mix and heat it up until the sugar is molten. Then once the cake mass is baked but still warm pour the syrup equally all over the cake mass. This will help to keep the yule log nice soft and juicy from the inside. Next spread the chestnut puree equally all over the mass and roll in carefully to create the roulade/swiss roll. At last keep cooking chocolate to melt and cover the whole roulade evenly with the molten chocolate. Then cut off both ends diagonally and place on top of the chocolate on the yule log. This will give the impression of a log stump on both ends.
5. 5
   Add the rest of the chocolate on all ends so that the yule log is completely covered in chocolate.At last you can add decoration such as marzipan figurine and icing sugar deco pieces. I made a mushroom and a snail of raw marzipan and painted them with some red food coloring. You can get creative at this point.