What Type Of Dark Chocolate Should I Use For The Yule Log?

Our answer

Nigella's Yule Log (from NIGELLA CHRISTMAS) is a chocolate roulade or Swiss roll that this filled with and coated in a chocolate buttercream. The buttercream is a combination of butter, icing (confectioners') sugar and melted chocolate.

For dark (bittersweet) chocolate, the higher the cocoa solids content, the more intese the chocolate flavour. As the melted chocolate will be mixed with butter and sugar, we would suggest using a chocolate with a high proportion of cocoa solids so that the buttercream is not insipid. Our choice would be to use a dark (bittersweet) chocolate with 62-70% cocoa solids or failing this the best quality dark chocolate you can find. As the buttecream contains a fair amout of sugar then you could use a chocolate with up to 80% cocoa solids, though beyond that the chocolate can become too bitter and we would avoid using American baking chocolate.