Holiday Countdown
Day 6: Dessert
Author: Alison Fong is the outreach intern for the University of Arkansas Museum, Museum Advisory Council member and a senior majoring in History, International & Global Studies, and Asian Studies.
What is your go-to Holiday dessert? Is it pie, fruit cake, angel cake, bread pudding, some kind of chocolate delicacy, or Aunt Bethany’s jello mold from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation?
For me, it has to be a yule log.
In all honesty, I’ve never had a yule log, and I’ve never made one. However, yule logs remind me of Christmas in Singapore where I was born. Singapore resides on the equator, which means that we have only two seasons: pouring rain or sweltering hot. Once December rolls around, there is no snow, no changing leaves, no falling foliage, and no dropping temperatures to indicate that the holidays are around the corner.
Instead, sales at toy stores (Toys-R-Us is still surprisingly popular in Singapore) and malls, holiday-themed dessert specials, decorated city and shopping districts, and new cakes in the display are the best indications that the holidays are here.
A yule log or a bûche de Noël is a cake that originated in France in the 19th century before spreading to other countries. It is hard to say how the yule log became a main staple in Singaporean bakeries, but yule logs are definitely an integral part of any baker’s repertoire. A typical yule logs consist of a chocolate Swiss roll that is filled with raspberry jam, decorated with chocolate buttercream and raked with a fork to create a bark-like texture, a light dusting of powdered sugar to represent snow, and other miscellaneous decorations like pine trees, berries, mushrooms made out of meringue, and plastic holiday-themed decor pinned to the cake’s surface.
Yule log recipes can be as quick as 45 minutes or 10 hours with the average prep and cook time falling around 2 to 3 hours long. It is a deceptively easy cake that requires both technique and creativity to execute it perfectly. Maybe I’ll try my hand at making a Yule log this winter, maybe I will take up the challenge. For my college student apartment’s kitchen, however, it may be a bit of a goliath to tackle. But if I were to attempt this monumental baking challenge that may disqualify me if I was on The Great British Baking Off (please don’t judge me, Mary and Paul), I would likely use this recipe: https://www.aheadofthyme.com/holiday-yule-log-cake/
What is the Yule log? Well, traditionally in regions of Western Europe, such as the United Kingdom, a Yule log (Yule clog or Christmas block) is a special log that was selected to burn on a hearth during the holidays. Like many other folk traditions, its true origin is difficult to pin down, and as such there are many iterations of its origin story. Some say that it originated in Germanic regions as a pagan ritual, which then spread throughout Western Europe.
The practice even spread to North America, though I imagine the tradition of the Yule log has fallen out of practice in modern times with “hearths” and “fireplaces” being less accessible to apartment- and townhouse-living folk like me. I have never heard about the Yule log from any of my American friends, but do you still practice selecting the Yule log for the holidays?
Anyway, if you’re keen on a challenge this holiday, maybe you can try making a Yule log for your celebration!
