A Christmas Dessert - Bûche de Noël

The Bûche de Noël I made this Christmas. The white shapes sprouting from my yule log? Meringue mushrooms of course!

If I had stayed in France, I would have wanted apple pie at Christmas. As I instead flew to Sacramento, California for the holidays, I wanted to bring back a taste of a French Christmas. So, I decided to make a Bûche de Noël, a traditional French dessert that we would call a yule log cake.

Around mid-December, Bûche de Noël began to appear in the pastry-shop windows of Toulouse. "Bûche" is the French word for log. They are small, cylindrical jelly roll cakes shaped and decorated as yule logs. These otherwise simple, brown cakes become a slice of woodland wonderment with little forest figures, sprigs of holly and a heavy frosting of powder-sugar adorning them. Small dear, a lone ax and mushrooms often complete the woodsy look.

Making the cake is a bit tricky for beginners. You have to roll a sheet of baked sponge cake into a cylinder shape, let it cool, and then go back and ice the curling cake carefully, trying not to brake it. Then you cover the entire log with frosting and add your woodland details on top. When the cake is cut, there is a spiral of frosted cake reminiscent of the rings in a log.

The most difficult part of my cake-baking experience was the meringue needed for the mushrooms and frosting. The Julia Child recipe I used called for meringue mushrooms and crystallized caramel cobweb decorations, two things that are normally beyond my pastry talents. I had to throw out two trail batches of meringue gone bad before I got it right! One tasted horribly burned and the other was too stiff. I decided to ditch the sugary cobweb, although I've never had a cobwebbed cake and it sounded tempting. But Christmas Eve dinner was fast approaching I had been yule logging most of my day away, so my cake was cobweb-less.

But, a culinary experience with Julia Child is bound to be worth it in the end. I was ultimately happy with my meringue mushrooms. They look very impressive once on the cake! And the bûche got many compliments which I should thank Julia for.

Of course, my family didn’t give up the apple pie tradition, and we ate a bit of both pie and bûche. However, I can see visions of yule logs dancing in our future Christmas Eve’s!


You can see more on how to make a “Bûche de Noël” here

The recipe I used was Julia Child's and can be found in the recipe book Christmas Memories. She makes it with an almond sponge cake and rum flavored frosting and I'm a fan.

Home. Which One?

I just got back to Toulouse after a two-week vacation in my hometown in Sacramento, California. Over vacation, I realized “home” was getting to be a tricky word.

While sipping coffee at Java City café just blocks from the Capitol in Sacramento, I mentioned to a high school friend that I was going “home” just after New Year’s. “Wait, you mean back to France?” she asked. Yes, exactly, home. After living in Toulouse, France for six months, my idea of home fluctuates constantly between France and California.

My friend also now lives far from Sacramento. She pointed out that we both use the word “home” to refer to the home where we are not. Sacramento is home for me when I am in Toulouse, and France is home when in California. For my friend, it is the same, except with New York.

Maybe this tendency to refer to the home where we are not is acknowledgment that we always feel slightly out of place these days in either home. We think we know our old hometown, but it seems unfamiliar at the same time. My friend used to go to cookie outings at this very same Java City with her mom when she was ten. But now she knows the cafés better in New York and has trouble finding her way around downtown Sacramento, where Java City is located.

Coming back to Sacramento after living in Toulouse was a bit of a shock for me because everything is the same, but seems different. The town, streets and people were familiar, but I also saw them with the French equivalent freshly imprinted in my mind. This made the familiar novel and absolutely intriguing.

The streets in Sacramento were amazingly expansive after getting used to the treacherously narrow “pathways” of streets in downtown Toulouse. They are so big in Sacramento that sometimes it felt a park had been covered with cement and road markings. I could see the sky stretch out forever above me while waiting for the light to change to green, and it was strangely awesome.

After months of thinking of coffee cups as the size of a shot glass, the immensity of the Venti at Starbucks in the US was breathtaking. We drink these tubs of coffee? This is the size of 50 French coffee cups. However, the taste of coffee with chocolate, milk and whip cream in it was a welcome one, this such a good idea, no wonder it comes in Venti!

My brother and I drove to the grocery store one night to pick up a few things. In Toulouse, most groceries close by 7 pm. But my brother and I waltzed into the one near our parents house at 9pm, and this wasn't one of the small, over priced stores that are open late in France, this was the full blown supermarket. I also didn’t have to lug my bags home as I usually do here in Toulouse, because, we had a vehicle! What a relief. When checking out I had a moment of doubt, should I help the bagger bag my groceries, or would that be rude? I decide to help bag because I’m now in the habit of it. I don’t think anyone has bagged my groceries since I’ve been in Toulouse, and absolutely no one has asked to help me out to my car. I probably should have accepted the help out in Sacramento just for the novelty of it.

Cheering at New Year’s was incredibly awkward given my new habit of looking directly in peoples’ eyes as I clink glasses. How strange that all my American friends avoided my stare! I felt very distant from them and a bit hurt until I reminded myself that looking deeply into another’s eyes while cheering in the US is more a sign of passionate love than friendly good wishes.

Returning to Toulouse felt comfortable and natural, which was also unexpected. The streets are still decorated with holiday lights and I was happy to be back to what now feels like home. Tomorrow I am going to the prefecture for the third time to get my provisional visa paperwork updated. This is a horrendous experience and probably the task I dread most in France. I will have trouble controlling my frustration over the lack of organization and the rudeness of the government workers. I will undoubtedly curse the French system and wonder why they can’t implement a more efficient one, like we have back home in the US. But for now, it is nice to be surprised by the novelty of my hometown of Sacramento, as well as the ease with which I re-enter my new one in Toulouse.