Yule Log Decoration

Day 1

A quick and easy, but yet tasty dish that I think starts of the new year is 'Yule Log', because it is January the 1st and I know a lot of you will be recovering from new years eve parties, this dish is going to be very simple. Not having a lot of time to make anything from scratch today was a big shame as there was a recipe a had been wanting to try out for a yule log.

So today is more of an equipment and decoration blog, as it has just been Christmas I got quite a few nice pieces of baking equipment, below will be photos of the equipment I used and the recipe on how to make the perfect butter cream to decorate you log with.

I got this brand new piping bag for Christmas and this is the first time I have had chance to use it and it did give the yule log a nice finish but was probably a lot of difficult to use and pipe with, as if you were running low on butter cream you have to take of 3 different layers of lids to add more in. Another thing I noticed was it was very hard to get out, and you had to add a lot of pressure which isn't exactly what you need when you are trying to get a smooth finish.

 

I was very happy opening this lovely set of 7 bowls and other little things on Christmas day, theses come in so much handy when you need to cook several things at once. In this set you get, a large bowl, a smaller bowl, a big and small sieve 3 measuring cups. they were great in this dish because of weighing out your simple ingredients and making sure you get nice silky butter cream.

 

 

This was the yule log before I decorated it, I admit it was cheating to buy it premade but everyone knows that not a lot of people have time to make it from scratch so I thought this would be easier.

my next step was to decorate to make the butter cream you will need

1.  3-4 big tablespoons of butter (non salted) I would advise getting stork.
2.  then 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder (add more I you think it needs it)
3.  finally 8 very large tables spoons of icing sugar.

If the icing sugar is not crumbly just add more butter - you can't got wrong with more butter!!

 

 

That was my finished product

when you are icing just go in neat straight lines, then when you get to the ends start in the middle and go round in a spiral until all the sponge is covered up.

for decoration sift some icing sugar gently over until it looks like nice snow and then you can add something on top like I did with my toad stools, I thought it added an extra bit of colour!