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Christmas in July
It’s always a good time to start practising a chocolate and pistachio bûche (or log to you and me). Remember that when working with chocolate, the most important thing is to have a cold environment — doing this on a day where the temperatures reached 30ºC was no mean feat. Certainly the incessant whisking of egg whites does not help with regulating one’s own body temperature, so again, I spent the afternoon sweating like a pig.
I used to love chocolate, I also used to love cake.
You’ll notice I use the words “used to”, there is nothing like spending 6 weeks’ constantly tasting the stuff that can put you off for life. I think this is a bit like those parents who discover that their children are smokers, so rather than just going off the wall, what they do is make them smoke a packet of 20 one after the other hoping that this will be enough to make them quit there and then.
Anyway, I digress . . . The bûche itself is a pistachio-flavoured genoise sponge layered with chocolate ganache. It looks great and was fun to make but I didn’t really like it, I think it has something to do with the weather — I would much prefer eating this snuggled up on my sofa in the cold winter months with either a glass of red wine or a mug of steaming coffee.
I encountered a brand new ingredient today — pistachio paste. This is something so green that it would…
