Now that the holidays are over, I have some pictures to share, starting with food, of course. Although the Bûche de Noël (Yule Log) is usually made for Christmas, I’ve made it a tradition to bake it as dessert for New Year’s Eve. After a couple years of stubbornly trying to make a certain recipe work and ending up with nothing but headaches, I jettisoned it in favor of the recipe in The Joy of Cooking (Scribner, 2006) and have not looked back since.

The log consists of a sheet of chocolate genoise soaked with a little bit of brandy, coffee buttercream in the center, and chocolate buttercream on the outside. Sadly, the tube of white gel icing I bought to make a more pronounced bark effect decided to run away from my pantry. The decorations are plastic ones we’ve saved from logs we had in France. I keep meaning to make little meringue mushrooms to decorate with, but then realize the recipe I have is for something like 60 mushrooms, when I only need three. Since the chocolate genoise plus chocolate buttercream were a little bit overkill, I’m planning on making a vanilla genoise next time.