Nigella's Yule Log

Asked by apalgal. Answered on 16th December 2011

Full question

I made Nigella's lovely Yule Log (Christmas, p191) with great success - it looked exactly like the picture in the book and tasted lovely. However my kids didn't like the bitterness of the dark chocolate in the frosting. Can this be made with milk chocolate, or do you have any other suggestions please? Many thanks.

Our answer

Whilst it would be possible to make the chocolate frosting for Nigella's Yule Log with milk chocolate, we suspect that the frosting will lack flavour as milk chocolate has less cocoa solids and it is these that provide the flavour.

Instead we suggest that you make the frosting using half dark chocolate (bittesweet chocolate) and half milk chocolate. This will help to reduce the intensity of the dark chocolate as the milk chocolate has more fat and sugar in it than dark chocolate. We would suggest that you use a good quality milk chocolate as some of the cheaper brands do not melt very well and can turn a little greasy.

If you only want to reduce the effect of the dark chocolate only slightly then you could use a dark chocolate that has a lower level of cocoa solids. Nigella prefers to use dark chocolate with 70% cocoa solids (or for the US bittersweet chocolate). However you could use a chocolate with a lower cocoa content (the content is usually stated in the ingredients list) as this will have less cocoa content and more sugar and so will be sweeter (for the US this is usually labelled as semi-sweet chocolate).