(continued)

You think a log sounds weird? Take a look at some other food traditions from around the world.

Fifteen years later, the long-retired Madame Frey has -- tant pis! -- no memory of my fiasco. Although she does recall other students' successes: one filled with a mocha cream and another covered in fresh chocolate shavings. Has she ever made one herself after demanding such creations from her students year after year? "No, they are too much work," she laughs. "I've tried to buy one, but I'm always too late, and they're already sold out."

Not so! Alan Tangren, the new pastry chef at Berkeley, California's Chez Panisse restaurant, says with a little practice and instruction making a Bûche de Nöel is très facile -- easier than pie. After all, he learned the basic recipe from a single episode of Julia Child's cooking show. However, he admits the techniques required to make the cake appear log-like require patience and imagination. Placing a sawed-off piece of the cake on top of the log to act as a tree knot, running a fork along the frosting to create the rough surface of bark, and covering it with meringue mushrooms and green, moss-like spun sugar, Tangren invokes his creativity to make a "a very stylized log," he says. "But you wouldn't mistake it for a log in the forest."

Yule love it! If you can't find a Bouche de Nöel at your local fancy baker, you could try to make it yourself. If you're insane.

Still, some even find these cakes too life-like to eat. Peter Mayle, the author of A Year in Provence who confesses to not having a sweet tooth, says, "My experience with the Bûche de Nöel has been confined to admiring them from afar rather than eating them. My idea of a suitably festive ending for a Christmas meal is more along the lines of a glass or two of champagne de Nöel or even a tot of Calvados de Nöel."

Poor guy. He has no idea what he's missing.

Author's Note: For my mother's sake, I have to add that she's an excellent cook. She just can't bake.