The secret to making a Yule log

I watch a lot of Great British Bake Off. I’d like to say it comes with the baking territory, but the truth is, I’m simply hooked. I love all of it: the triumphs, the disasters, the crap jokes, the obscure technicals, all of it. My dedication to GBBO has taught me a couple of things: the Hollywood handshake has been so devalued in recent years as to be completely worthless; it’s probably worth breaking down and having a cry over your macarons just to get a hug from Noel Fielding, and swiss rolls are a bloody nightmare. They’re fiddly: they require whisking the yolks and whites separately, and then gingerly folding them together, before turning the whole thing out onto a tea-towel, doing some kind of weird pre-roll to set the shape, and then rolling again. And then, after you’ve put all that care and elbow grease into them, they crack on you.

A yule log (sometimes called a bûche de Noël) is a roulade: a light sponge, normally plain vanilla sponge, baked in a Swiss roll tin, and then rolled with a sweetened cream filling, decorated with chocolate ganache or buttercream to resemble a fallen log. It is, basically, a chocolate-covered swiss roll.

So why am I suggesting that you put yourself through this pain? Well, I’m not, I’m going to give you a few cheats that will not only make the whole process significantly easier, but also, I think, produce a far superior cake. When I came across a method for an old-fashioned ‘jelly roll’ from Queen of American technical baking, Stella Parks, that promised an end to these fiddly processes, I was sold. Here, she did away with a lot of the usual swiss roll faff, by using a bunch of easier techniques, which I’ve applied to the chocolate yule log.