While studying three years of high school French, I listened with interest to the traditional French holiday dessert Bûche de Noël, or Yule log cake.
It’s made to look like an actual log rolled up with filling, iced with gnarled chocolate to resemble bark, and adorned with edible poinsettia or holly and wee meringue mushrooms dusted with cocoa powder — très charmante (how charming)!
Never the French scholar, I’ve long forgotten most everything except that particular cake and wondered if any Lexington-area bakeries offered them during the holidays. I quickly found two — Martine’s Pastries in Lexington and European Delights Gourmet Bakery in Nicholasville.
Elena Maydanovich is the owner of European Delights, specializing in pastries, croissants, strudels, cookies and cakes. She’s originally from Ukraine, but she’s lived in this area for 14 years, baked at various establishments for about 25 years, and made Yule log cakes for many years as a baker.
Yule log cakes, such as this example from European Delights, are a favorite French holiday dessert.
Upon opening her bakery 11 years ago, she made a point to offer them during the holidays. She started out selling about 30 annually, but as their popularity has spread, she now sells about 200, both by reservation and walk-ins who see them on display in her cake case and can’t resist taking one home.
“I’ve noticed every year more and more people getting it as a tradition,” she said. “Every year you see those same customers come back.”
Maydanovich said her Yule log cake is chiffon, baked like a sheet cake and filled with either chocolate mousse and raspberry or praline cream and apricot before being rolled up. Then the chocolate bark is added to the exterior, along with the meringue mushrooms and other edible decorations. In all, her cakes take about six hours to complete from start to finish. They are available in sizes of either a dozen or two dozen servings.
The cakes take some patience and skill to make, she said.
“It’s a very light cake,” she said. “You kind of have to be familiar with baking cakes to make the chiffon cake, because you can overbake it and it’s not going to come out right. … It is a very sensitive cake.”
Another local baker with the chops to tackle the annual Yule log cake challenge is Martine Holzman, who grew up in a small French village. From an early age, she remembers baking with her grandmother at a wood-fired stove and making Yule log lakes each Christmas with her mother, a chef.
Bakers typically put their own spin on the tradition, such as this cake from Martine’s Pastries.
Holzman has owned and operated Martine’s Pastries for about 22 years, and said she’s offered the holiday Yule log cakes for seven or eight seasons now.
The bakery, which has an onsite café, offers French pastries, cookies, desserts and custom cakes. Holzman’s Yule log cakes come in chocolate/amaretto and vanilla/Grand Marnier varieties, both iced with French buttercream.
In France, “everyone had their own recipe, usually like a chiffon cake is the base and after that people would flavor them with what they would like” such as rum or her family’s favorite, cognac.
She said she opens a preordering period for the cakes each fall, and she’ll have made hundreds by Christmas.
Sometimes she jazzes up the designs, adding edible pine boughs, edible glitter in the chocolate, dusting powdered sugar “snow” or playing with different color schemes.
“We kind of change it a little bit every year,” Holzman said. “No year is the same. But they are very labor-intensive, so that is why we do it only once a year.”
Holzman said her cakes, which serve about eight, take roughly four hours to complete. By early December, her workspace starts to look “like Santa’s shop” with different stations for different stages of the cakes’ transformation, she said.
She said most people buy them for their families’ festivities, but some local professionals also buy them as unique gifts for their clients; some even order 40 to 50 cakes at once.
Traditionally the cake is eaten on Christmas Day, or sometimes Christmas Eve, whenever families’ celebrations are held, Holzman said.
“That’s kind of the thing that you expect to eat, that you look forward to sharing with your family,” she said.
And though the cakes started as a humble pastry — as far back as Medieval times according to some sources — they’ve evolved in France to be highly elaborate, with novel accessories and exotic fillings.
“People go way out in the designs, and everyone kind of makes it a specialty of their stores, their signature kind of thing,” Holzman said.
Maydanovich said while the Yule log cake tradition has its roots in France, it’s become a part of many American households’ festivities over the years.
“It’s the best cake for Christmastime, a traditional Christmas cake,” she said. “It’s different. It’s unique.”