The bûche de Noël is a French tradition: a cake baked in the shape of a yule log, often covered with meringue and marzipan mushrooms. Most bûches are rolled genoise cakes filled with buttercream, though ice cream versions are popular as well, especially given how easy they are to store and serve.
But while pretty much every French family has a bûche de Noël on the table at Christmas, there’s also an haute cuisine bûche tradition that appears quite a bit earlier in the year: I had the chance to taste this bûche from pastry chef Angelo Musa, the new head pastry chef of the Plaza Athénée hotel, back in September.
It was a little strange to be digging into this Christmas tradition when it was still 95 degrees outside, but it was no less delicious.
Musa’s version of the bûche plays with the traditional hazelnut flavor, but he added some citrus notes to make it a bit lighter. He started with a genoise cake made with toasted hazelnut flour and lemon confit, which he filled with a light hazelnut cream and a hazelnut praline craquelin. He then covered the entire cake with a very thin praline crisp, a vanilla cream, and a very thin layer of yuzu ganache. He finished with chocolate petals, to represent the bark of this atypical but no less delicious bûche.
I had the opportunity to speak to Musa about his influences in creating this innovative bûche, which he says comes from his interest in Asian pastry as well as his desire to create something that has the perfect texture — somewhere between creamy and crispy.
“If you use the best ingredients but you don’t have the right texture, you lose about 40 percent of the pastry,” he says. “It’s super important.”
He knew from the very beginning that he wanted to create a departure from a more traditional bûche, though the final result took him five tries to get right. Not that he minds.
“It has to remain fun,” he says. “And for me, it’s still fun.”
Image care of Plaza Athénée