Praline Chocolate Yule Log

praline chocolate yule log
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Praline Chocolate Yule Log; fluffy chocolate cake rolled around hazelnut praline paste and smooth chocolate ganache, perfect for the festive season.

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The only thing better than enjoying your own country’s traditional Christmas desserts is squeezing in as many Christmas desserts from everywhere into your festive baking as possible.

German lebkuchen, Italian panettone, Scandinavian kransekake, and, of course, French bûche de Noël. The latter is what we call a Yule Log, and a Yule Log is the muse of today’s ramblings.

praline chocolate yule log

A far cry from the heavy, alcohol-sodden puddings of British tradition, the Yule Log is a light bake with impressive results. You won’t need hours and hours of slow cooking, just a few minutes in the oven and a little care in decorating will provide a perfect festive centrepiece.

The Yule Log is most often made of a flourless chocolate sponge cake, using fluffy egg whites instead of baking powder or bicarbonate of soda. This lack of flour not only makes the cake incidentally gluten free but wonderfully light and souffle-like. The cake is then rolled around praline paste and rich whipped chocolate ganache, before being dressed in more ganache and decorated like a winter tree trunk.

Sink your fork through the layer of creamy ganache, offering both subtlety and boldness, into the fluffiest chocolate sponge. While this Praline Chocolate Yule Log looks like the height of indulgence, it’s actually quite a delicate dessert.

praline chocolate yule log

The chocolate elements of today’s Praline Chocolate Yule Log are brought to you by the wonderful people at Cocoa Runners. Their new range of cooking chocolate is utterly perfect for baking into desserts, or creating frostings and ganaches to decorate cakes. I used their cocoa powder to add a deep cocoa flavour to the flourless chocolate cake in this Yule Log – it’s so much better than the flat or stale chocolate flavour that comes from supermarket cocoa powders. In that gorgeous chocolate ganache you see pictured, I used their 63% cocoa dark chocolate (but their 44% cocoa milk chocolate would also work well). The smoothness of the dark chocolate is perfect for using in ganache, it doesn’t have any of the burnt bitter flavour that comes with big brand dark chocolates that are rushed through production. Cocoa Runners is all about celebrating craft chocolate, traded fairly and made with care to ensure that the end product is every bit as delicious and luxurious as it should be.

Oh, and you can use MaverickBaking10 for 10% off Cocoa Runners chocolate!

praline chocolate yule log

I also feel compelled to talk about the Praline element of this Praline Chocolate Yule Log. I would endlessly recommend treating yourself to some pastry chef style praline paste, made with a blend of sugar and either almonds or hazelnuts. However, these products can be a bit expensive, or only available in 1kg catering containers. On that basis, I would encourage you (as always) to get creative and use whatever you have in your kitchen or whatever you just love to eat. You could swap out the praline paste for shop-bought salted caramel, crunchy peanut butter, Nutella, Biscoff, or any other spread you would pair with chocolate. It will still create a gorgeous festive Chocolate Yule Log.

The only things I would strictly encourage you to have to hand are a Swiss roll tin, that being a large flat baking tray to non-UK readers, and some greaseproof paper. They’re just about the only ingredients or equipment that couldn’t be creatively replaced in this recipe.

Oh, and do please refrain from worrying too much about the rolling and decorating of this Praline Chocolate Yule Log. It may appear fiddly by the instructions but let’s be honest, there is no mistake that a generous amount of chocolate ganache and icing sugar can’t cover!

I hope you guys enjoy this Praline Chocolate Yule Log as much as we have. It’s definitely one I’ll be making more than once over this cold month. Stay happy, stay healthy, and thanks as always for stopping by.

If you want to save this Praline Chocolate Yule Log for later, pin the image below!

To make this Praline Chocolate Yule Log, simply follow the recipe below.

2 Replies to “Praline Chocolate Yule Log”

  1. Where can you buy the praline paste?

    1. Hello Bea! Usually Amazon is my first stop, either for large catering sizes or smaller jars. This is the praline paste I use: https://amzn.to/2PtbM9r

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