This is a Yule log recipe—Bûche de Noël being the French for...well, for Yule log. Literally:   Noël is the word for Christmas, and bûche the word for log.   However, this is a very much fancier recipe than most. I got it from my mother; but I don't know where she got it, whether from a newspaper or a friend.   It's a fair bet it was never made by my grandmother—not during the Depression.   However, my mother must have picked it up early in her marriage, for I have known it all my life.
        I think she must originally considered it to be the sort of fancy recipe that one makes for guests.   Clearly it was something of a talking piece.   Every Christmas of my childhood, she told us that it was a cake that had no flour in it.   Apparently, this always confounded people who asked her for the recipe.   No one could believe that it was possible to bake a cake without flour.   Which just goes to show, of course, that my mother has lived most of her life in either Britain or Canada, since many European cakes are flourless.
        This particular type of Bûche de Noël doesn't keep well, having whipped cream in it.   However, by the time my parents had three children, this was hardly a problem.   The Bûche didn't have much chance of lasting more than a couple of days.   It was a great favourite with everyone.
       It is a very rich cake, with its thick, sweet icing lightened by whipped cream—light only in texture, of course, not in calories.   You really can't go back for seconds, no matter how much you are tempted.

Ingredients

Directions

Preparing the Cake
Separate the eggs.   Beat the whites until they are stiff, and then beat the yolks until they are pale.   Add the icing sugar and cocoa to the yolks, and blend them well in with the beater.   Fold in the whites.
        Line a 15" by 10" pan with foil wrap, butter it well, and dust it with icing sugar.   Pour in the batter.   Bake at 325°F for twelve to fifteen minutes, until the cake is completely set, and starting to separate from the foil at the edges of the pan.   Let the cake cool on a wire rack.

Preparing the Icing
Cream the butter.   Add the icing sugar, cocoa, and instant coffee, and beat until fluffy.   (At least, these are the directions given to me by my mother.   However, she never followed them precisely, finding the result too stiff for even a heavy duty electric mixer.   Instead, she thinned the recipe slightly with milk or light cream in order to get the icing to blend properly.)

Preparing the Filling
Add the icing sugar to the whipping cream, and beat it until it is stiff.

Assembly
Tear off a large piece of waxed paper, suffiencient to completely cover the cake, with some to spare at either end.   Butter the paper, and dust it with icing sugar.   Lay it, buttered side down, over the cake in the pan.   Carefully flip the cake over, still in the pan.   Then remove the pan, and pull the foil away from the cake.   Be very cautious when doing this, since the cake is very thin and tears easily.
        Using no more than half the icing, gently spread it over the cake in a thin layer.   Cover this with a layer of whipped cream, using two-thirds to three-quarters of the cream.
        Using the waxed paper, carefully roll up the cake into a roulade form.   (The finished cake should be as long as the cake pan is wide, i.e. ten inches.)   You will almost certainly find that the cake sticks to the waxed paper in places; and a knife should be used to ease the paper from the cake.
        My mother always had enormous difficulty rolling the cake up without breaking it, and used to get my father to help her.   Oddly enough, neither I nor my sister has ever had much trouble with it in this regard.   It does, however, have a definite tendency to stick to the pan or the foil lining, and also to the waxed paper used to assist in rolling it up.
        As the finished cake is hard to move, it is advisable to roll the cake off the last section of waxed paper directly onto the cake plate, and complete its decoration there.   Try to so roll it as to place the loose end of the cake underneath, touching the plate, so the cake won't try to unroll itself.

Icing the Cake
Use the remaining icing to cover the top and flanks of the cake.   In my experience, if you ice the ends, the resultant end slices are too sweet, since they have a disproportionate amount of icing on them.   We really loved this when we were kids, though, so this is clearly a matter of opinion.   As an adult, I prefer to leave the ends uniced.
       Use the side of the knife to roughen the icing to simulate the texture of bark.        Fleck the remaining whipped cream on top of the icing to simulate snow.   It can be very effective to use more on one side of the cake than on the other, imitating the effects of the wind.

Makes ten to twelve slices, depending
on how thickly the cake is cut.