Baking Up a Forest at Creative Cakes

As seen in SouthtownStar - December 4, 2008
By Donna Vickory, Staff Writer

Each Christmas Eve morning, Creative Cakes bakery in Tinley Park is transformed into a buche de noel assembly line. With 30 to 40 orders for the traditional holiday yule log, the bakers get to work rolling the sponge cake, spreading the icing and decorating with sugar flowers and meringue mushrooms. We recently went behind the scenes to watch owners Beth Fahey and Becky Palermo make one of those popular cakes.

Professionals use plastic wrap to help roll the cake into a log shape. Fahey and Palermo also recommend chilling the cake before icing.

“You should do that with any cake,” Fahey said. “It makes the process easier.”

At Creative Cakes, decorative flowers are made by hand from sugar. But Fahey said home bakers can make their own with an icing bag full of buttercream.

“Start with a big squeeze, then ease up, letting it taper off, at the end of the petal,” Palermo said.

A Christmas tradition in France, Belgium and Quebec, the buche de noel is made and decorated to look like a real log, replete with bark-like exterior created with the help of a pastry comb, holly accents and the aforementioned mushrooms, which are held together with buttercream “glue”.

The buche de noel is just one of many holiday specials created at Creative Cakes. For more ideas and information, call Creative Cakes at 614-9755 or visit realbuttercream.com.