Galactic Groot Yule Log

I was just bored on New Years day and with all the grocery stores closed for the holiday I had to make do with what I could find at the corner store. I looked at this like one of those Top Chef challenges and thought how do I raise boxed cake mix up to the next level.. Well I had just watched Guardians of the Galaxy on TV and also was seeing tons of Yule Log recipes so I put 2 & 2 together and got: Groot Yule!

Pretty easy instructions here... just follow what it says on the box!

Now I must say I usually make my cakes and stuff from scratch but sometimes when you just want to play around a box comes in handy :-)

In order to do a Yule log I needed the cake to be fairly thin so I used a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Once the cake came out of the oven there is a neat trick to rolling the log. Take a clean towel and sprinkle cocoa powder over it. when you take the cake out immediately flip it upside down on the towel. Remove the pan and peel away the parchment paper. If any of the edges are "hard" you can trim them off at this time.

With the cake on the towel slowly & loosely roll it while it is still warm. Let the cake cool for at least 30 minutes. Once the cake is cool carefully unroll it and remove the towel. Quickly spread the icing on the inside and re roll the cake. Trim the two ends to make them straight.

Ice the "log" with chocolate icing as you regularly would then add chocolate "drop" eyes. With the eyes in place spread the icing into a "Groot" face, adding eyebrows slight bulge for a nose and a line for the mouth.

To make the bark "hair" melt milk and dark chocolate in separate bowls then spread them on a silicon baking pad trying to have a "natural" bark texture to them. I also poured a couple of Twigs. I put the whole mat in the freezer for a few minutes to harden the chocolate. Once they are hard you can peel them off the pad and place them on Groots head. I should have done these in reverse putting the dark chocolate on the pad first and then fully covering that in the milk chocolate as the pad had some texture that would imprint on the bottom of the chocolate and added to the bark feel. I did not expect the chocolate to smooth out as much as it did as it cooled as it became very smooth in the freezer. Next time I will wait to the chocolate has cooled down a bit in the bowl before spreading it as it will hold its shape & texture better. This would help especially with the "twigs" as you can see in the pictures above they spread out way more than I would have liked.

If you look at Groot he has green moss growing on him. I did not want to use green icing as it would not look natural. So I threw a handful of Pistachios in a blender and made my own "Moss Powder". I should have sprinkled this on the chocolate before I put it in the freezer so it would stick into the chocolate bark.. but oh well.. maybe next time.. :-)

Last thing was to drop a dot of white icing on the eyes and sprinkle on the Moss.

And it was done! A Galactic Groot Yule Log!