Christmas Wrap Up and the Buche Off

It has taken a few days to recover from all the events and meals of Christmas but here we are and I have to say that I really enjoyed the holidays this year.  I'm sure that it helped that I wasn't a slave to all of the fun, retail holiday madness but I got to spend quality time enjoying activities such as wrapping presents, baking and most importantly planning my Christmas Eve dinner.  We have always hosted Christmas Eve dinner at our home throughout my entire life and it has always been a combination of Polish and Italian classics that were shared amongst family and friends.  Through the years certain elements have always held true such as having Pierogi, the Polish Mushroom Soup and some sort of seafood dishes to celebrate "La Vigilia" which is feast of the seven fishes, a traditional Southern Italian event.  We've never had quite seven and this year we tapped out the menu at 6 different fish dishes but I knew that this year would be the time to go all out with a menu.  It was like I was getting an opportunity to dig deep into my fantasy Christmas playbook and make things that either I believed always belonged on our Christmas Eve table or recipes that I wanted to tackle that would just take the meal to the next level (considering I feel like now that we throw all of these dinner parties that you just can't skimp out when it comes to really special dinners like Christmas Eve).  Here is our menu rundown for Christmas Eve:
-Cold Lobster Spread (for guests to pick on as they arrived)
-Crab Stuffed Mushrooms
-Fried Calamari
-Roasted Shrimp Cocktail (Thank you Ina Garten for revolutionizing the way I make Shrimp)
-Traditional Polish Mushroom Soup aka Barszcz
-Baccala (Salted Cod in Red Sauce) based on my Grandmother's recipe with a few added additions to give it my own touch.  I have to tell you that I was really nervous about making this dish...I kept dwelling on all of these doubts as I was making it of "would the fish be to salty, would it taste anything like my Grandmother's, or would I miss the mark completely on this one like the infamous meat sauce incident of 2009?"  But once I served the dish that night, got the baccala seal of approval from Ray and continued to watch as they scraped the dutch oven clean I knew that I has mastered the art of the baccala).

-Potato and Sauerkraut Pierogi
-Scallop Gratin
-Clementine Granita (you knew that there would have to be a Martha touch in there somehow.

-Buche de Noel (the French Chocolate Log)

One could say that I was borderline obsessed with making the Buche.  I have seen them in magazines for years and always loved the way it looked and thought how it would be this amazing culmination of a holiday dinner.  One day in talking about Christmas dinners, I made mention of making a buche to my fellow "fabulously domesticated" friend Carmina who got just as excited as I did about making one and then I knew there was no backing out.  There are always 3 elements to making the buche - The chocolate sponge cake that needs to be baked to a perfect consistency for rolling, the mousse that acts as the filling and then the ganache frosting.  I used a recipe from The Canal House for my cake and frosting but wanted a little bit of a lighter element for the mousse so I used Denise's wonderful white chocolate frangelico mousse instead and it was perfect.  I'm still picking at the leftovers 4 days later but it was a huge hit and once you were in the thick of it rolling the cake and piping the chocolate frosting on, it wasn't as overwhelming as I thought it would be.  Carmina's came out just as nice and was as big as a hit at her family's Christmas Dinner as well.  We did realize though...that next year we are going to make them together along with half of the other elements of our Christmas Dinner recipes that we traded off. 

the buche after a successful role

after the icing

  

about to be devoured.