Christmas Cake??

In Mexico and USA, that I know off there is no particular cake that we eat for Christmas. In Mexico there are some characteristic desserts  of the season, as well as in the USA, but not one specific cake for the Christmas Dinner. Well, in France they do, is called a buche. The interesting thing is that buche only refers to the shape of the cake and not the flavor, so it can basically be any cake, which ever is yoour fqvorite as long as it is in a log shape or buche you can eat in it Christmas. Some are decorated with Christmas motifs, and some with no particular theme, but always nicely decorated.
At school they taught us, how to make this cake in the Pistachio-Chocolat flavor modality, as well as a bread called Pain de Genes. The rectangular cake is made of the left over batter, just for the Chef to show us a different way to present this cake for another ocassion besides Christmas.

The Buche Pistachio-Chocolat was ok, but a little too rich in chocolate flavor for me, since it was a pistachio Genoise, with chocolate ganache in between the layer, and a choclate glaze. But I can't deny that the presentation of this cake is very elegant.

The Pain du Genes, is not a formal bread at all, but I quite like it since it is mainly almond bread it has a much milder taste.

Even though you already see what the inside looks like, I will still post a picture of what I got for "la degustation".

For our practical we, of course did the difficult one of the two, the Buche Pistachio-Chocolate.
Doing the glazing of teh cake so that is smooth, even and all over the cake is very difficult> Somehow I managed to get it done like this, but things don't end here. Once you have it glazed you have to move it somewhere where the chocolate can set, so I put mine behind me, and all was ok, except when the chef passed real quick beside it, and gently hit my cake. The result, my chocolate glazed cracked. Because of this I could not make the vertical decoration the chef had done in demo, and I had to figure out a way to hide my cracked cake without it looking horrible or that I was covering something. I managed to make it look pretty descent, or at least I think so.

When we were all presenting our cakes to be graded, I saw that most of them just did the normal decoration even though their glazed was cracked. I had second thoughts about my decoration, but then I though mine is ok, since mine shows a perfect glaze hidden the crack.