Mmmm...history...sort of

This is a Yule Log...it's a sponge cake (using the separated egg sponge method), chocolate mousse and chocolate butter cream with marzipan holly and italian meringue mushrooms. It's not hard to make, just intricate. It's history is pretty intricate, too. 

You see, back in the day...and by that I mean WAY back, before the Christian faith sort of took over the world, pagans worshiped things like the sun and the moon and the turning of the seasons. One of the ways they did this in the winter time was to burn a log and have a get together to celebrate the shortening of the sunlight during winter time. What would become the Catholics then adopted this tradition, along with many other pagan beliefs, in an effort to make it easier for the recently converted from receding back to their old faith. Instead of burning the yule log, they made it into a cake! Yay! Not as exciting, but way yummier. 

This is brioche...it's a very buttery bread...in fact it's almost all butter. It's also delicious. It apparently also started the French Revolution (according to a certain culinary school). When Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake" (which she didn't ACTUALLY say), it was in reference to this bread. Back then, anything that used an inordinate amount of eggs, butter, or milk was considered above the simple class of "bread". It was a cake eaten by the upper class, those that could afford food products that were expensive...like butter. Poor Marie...shoulda kept her mouth shut. This particular style of brioche is called "brioche a tete". It means "head cake" in French. It's meant to look like a head in a basket...like a head that's just been cut off by a guillotine. It's yummy...and disturbingly so.

Yeast is not hard to make...you take some grapes, squish them and put them in a bucket with some flour and water...you feed the grapes with this flour and water mix for about 3 weeks. Once you get the grapes out of there, you've got perfectly good baking yeast. Well...sometime in the past someone over proofed some bread dough they made and decided to bake it off...why waste it right? That's where we get sourdoughs...the over proofing resulted in a tangy bread with lots of holes and a tough outer crust. It's a great way to take what this poor guy thought was a major boo-boo and make it into something fantastic.

America has produced some of my favorite foods. The modern hamburger, the hot dog, deep dish pizza. One of my personal favs is the chocolate chip cookie. One day, a while ago (I'm not a freaking historian, you guys) someone decided to cut a few corners making a very popular chocolate cookie and just threw chunks of chocolate into plain cookie batter hoping the chocolate would homogenize and melt into the cookie dough and magically create the desired product. Instead, that one mistake turned into a baking miracle. The chocolate cookie is hands down the favorite cookie in America. People come to this country in search of the great American cookie, and thy name is chocolate chip.

You never know what's going to happen in life...sometimes what you thing is a great disaster turns out to be your greatest triumph. Baking is a great profession because the mistakes you make don't mean it's the end of the world, nobody dies because of bread...except Marie Antoinette...but really, she had it coming, right?