The day dawned on the morning I dread, the day I have to make my sons chocolate log. I have been doing this for years and you would suppose that by now I would have become used to the occasion, not so!
The problem is that there are so many things that can go wrong with a this type of cake. The eggs and sugar need to be beaten over a bowl of hot water until thick and pale in colour. This can go horribly wrong and the resulting pan of sweet scrambled egg is too awful to contemplate.
Let us suppose that this phase has gone well. Next the sifted plain flour, sugar,cocoa powder, raising agent and a pinch of salt must be added very quickly indeed but without knocking all the hard won air out of the mix. Mess this up and the result is a bowl of chocolate flavoured wall paper paste.
Next the mixture must be transferred to a greased and lined ( with none stick paper that truly is non stick.....almost impossible to find), and put in to a hot oven for about seven minutes. This is a real menace as seven minutes may not be quite enough, result a squishy mess, alternatively six minutes may be too much, result a sheet of cardboard which will not roll. All one can do is to take a guess, today I removed my cake from the oven after six minutes, another thirty seconds would have been too much at the high temperature required to cook this cake.
Now the cake must be turned out in to a sheet of greased proof paper on which caster sugar has been sprinkled, I need not tell you of the pitfalls this procedure is fraught with.
If all goes well one must then make a cut one inch in from the short edge to within an inch of the other side, the only simple part of the whole blessed business, but then it must be rolled up in the greased proof paper and left to cool for a nail biting hour or so.
Now comes the part that is worse than all the rest, it must be unrolled again so that it can be spread with chocolate butter cream. During this process the fan-tods, the jim-jams and the screaming hebegeebees are quite a common occurrence. The cake can so easily crack and fall in to shame making pieces, I have seen, with some satisfaction I might add the great Gordon Ramsey( not a patch on Floyd), have to stick one together with cream.
Icing the cake with a degree of realism is a point of pride with me and at this point my four years of fine art training come in to play, this is the only enjoyable part of the whole processes. The Icing is added and made to look like bark, the hollows are painted with melted dark chocolate and then when dried and set carefully dust with icing sugar to show up the tree rings and the texture of the bark.
Some ancient bits of plastic holly and a Merry Christmas sign are applied,(every year I forget where I have put them and spend days searching the kitchen). My son is sentimentally attached to these as we have been using them since he was a baby. This year I added a rather dashing spray of cranberries, purchased to be used in the event of my being unable to locate the old decorations.
If all has gone well things can still go wrong. The cake is not to be eaten until Christmas Day and during this time someone can, and in the past has , knocked the cake off the shelf where is has been put for safe keeping. Drop a heavy object on the cake, or even sit down on the cake. If Bob Cratchetts Missus had her doubts about the quantity of flour in her Christmas pudding that is as nothing to the annual three day horror I go through every year. Once I had to make the thing three times....... dreadful.......I can not say more!
Dinner was a huge piece of brisket on the bone which took over six hours to cook and was as tender as butter when eaten with roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings mushy peas and gravy. The piece remaining resembles the north face of the Eiger and will I suspect be as hard to conquer. It is to be eaten on Christmas Day with the Remains of the bronze turkey that is to be tomorrows dinner. I never cook on Christmas day.......never
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Our cat has haunted the kitchen all day until she received her share of the hot beef, after which, replete she slept in the armchair for the rest of the night.
It has been a lovely day, we played cards and drank wine , ate chocolates and then regretted it, all the lovely Christmassy things, just a wonderful busy happy day, I ask for nothing more.
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