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Friday, January 1, 2010

You'll Love the Yule Log


Every year I make a yule log for our Christmas Eve dinner. Well, actually I started off buying them when the kids were small and Christmas was frenzied but things are more manageable now so I've upped the anty and make my own. It really isn't as hard as it seems, trust me I'm really no Martha Stewart.

Here's how I do it. First get yourself a cake mix. In our family that means, get yourself a chocolate cake mix. I baked mine in a cookie sheet (greased, of course) that has slightly high sides, but I've also done it in a large-size lasagna pan. The cake mix actually made the yule log
plus seven cupcakes. 

When the yule log was baked I dumped the cake out onto a clean kitchen towel and rolled it up and left it to cool. I made the icing (frosting to any American readers) - again chocolate, of course, and veeeery carefully unrolled the cake and iced it. The cake always cracks when I unroll it but that doesn't matter as you just shove icing over everything and that glues it together. When the top side is iced, you roll it back up and then cut off a few inches from one end, to form the branch. 

Once the outside of the yule log is iced, the fun can begin. I used a toothpick to make the swirls in the icing at the ends of the log, and to make the faux bark look. Then I sprinkled icing sugar along with some snowflake sprinkles to make faux snow. Oh and finally every year we put our faux plastic axe in the log to add to the authentic look. I got that plastic axe years ago in one of our store-bought yule logs - so, I guess, that means you really should start off buying one and then progress to making your own. One year I made little mushrooms out of leftover batter baked in mini cupcake pans, and I have plans to make chocolate flakes to help with the faux bark look.

It is fun and not really all that hard to do - really just plain simple!

3 comments:

  1. Hi Gracie,
    The blog looks good! I, too, make a Yule log each year and for mushrooms, I use a large marshmallow as the cap nad a mini one as the stem. They are obviously very pliable, so it is easy to make that mushroom shape.

    Your looks yummy!!
    Cheers,
    Linda

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Linda. Thanks so much for stopping by. I'm just getting used to this blogging thing and hadn't noticed your comment until today.

    I never thought of using marshmallows to make the mushrooms. Do you stick them together with icing and decorate them in any way? I'll have to try that next year. Every year it is a bit different.

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