In my junior high French class, I had the most wonderful teacher, Mademoiselle Wilson (I think her name is Lisa Zilch now). She is one of the reasons I wanted to be a teacher; she was probably one of my most favorite teachers in the entire world. During Christmas time, to show how the holiday is mostly traditionally celebrated in France, we would do parties and bring traditional food like quiche, crepes, and Buche de Noels (Yule Log cakes).

My mother has been purging the house of most of my stuff now and sending it to me, and sent me a French Christmas packet with the recipe a couple of months ago. I was wondering what to do with it until the other day, some of Jared’s work friends decided to put together a potluck for tomorrow night. I decided to be adventurous and here’s how it went down:

First you make the cake part. It’s a sponge cake baked in a jelly roll pan really flat. Then you roll it in a towel to cool, then unroll it, frost it, then roll it up again:

Then I set to work on the Meringue Mushrooms. Apparently, they are traditional. And since I’m all about doing a traditional French recipe from scratch, I made the candy mushrooms (NOT REAL MUSHROOMS!!!):

While those baked for 40 minutes, I cuddled with Stevie, who felt very neglected, and then frosted the cake part of the “log.”:

Looking pretty log-y! However I was getting pretty tired, so I cheated and just did normal frosting- it still tasted pretty good when I licked my fingers at the end ;):

Then, the mushrooms were out of the oven, so I put the pieces together, dusted the tops with cocoa (it looked pretty!), and stuck them to the cake. Then I dusted the cake with a thin layer of “snow” (powdered sugar):

Voila! There you have it. I wish I had something pretty and green to garnish it with… but this will have to do for now. Not too bad for a first try… hopefully the people at the party will enjoy it!