Disaster, was what happened the first few time I baked a Swiss Roll cake. ...the cake started to crack while rolling. The roll remained "elusive" for quite a while. Till one day I read a tip in some magazine that fixed the rolling problem once and for all.

The trick is to peel off the baking paper then, roll it with the aid of a kitchen towel dusted with caster sugar. Let cool completely, unroll, spread the filling and roll again.

This method has never failed me. Now, the rolls crack no more!!

Yule logs make a very impressive and nice looking, light treat and the cake above is what I had sent with my daughter for her Christmas Party at school last year.

Here's what you'll need for a Christmas Log cake:

5 eggs

100 gms sugar

100 gms cake flour

25 gms cocoa

4 tbsps oil

for the filling:

200 gms strawberry (or any other) jam

for the ganache:

75 gms milk chocolate

4 tbsp cream

Beat sugar and eggs till the mixture becomes pale and creamy and triples in volume. Stop beating when the mixture falls in ribbons when the beaters are lifted off the vessel.

Sift together the flour and the cocoa and fold in lightly. I do this in 3 additions. Then, add the oil, one tbsp at a time and fold in. Pour in a swiss roll pan (greased and lined) and bake at 200 deg C in a pre-heated oven for about 8 - 10 mins.

Roll as described above.

While the cake cools, prepare the ganache by heating the cream till it almost reaches boiling point (Don't let it boil though) and pour over the chocolate. Mix well and let it cool. As it cools, the ganache will thicken.

For this cake, the filling was a simple strawberry jam slathered generously. Really generously. After all, the cake was for 3 years olds!!

Ice with buttercream. I would reckon you would need about half the recipe. I used plain buttercream and then topped the cake with a milk chocolate ganache. Use a fork to give it a bark look.

The ganache, for whatever reason, went horribly wrong (the recipe is OK, my guess is that I made a mistake in measuring out the cream)...it was more runny than I would have liked it to be. But by this time, I was way too lazy to add some more chocolate to fix the runny ganache and plodded on with the one I had. Fortunately, I ended up with a nice looking log!!

I am rushing this off to the 50th edition of Sugar High Friday at Baking History, an event started by Jennifer. This also goes to JZ for Santa's Holiday Challenge.