I have not always been a good baker. I was, for a long time, a barely competent baker who followed a recipe down to the sixteenth teaspoon of fairy tears called for. I would search high and low for fairy tears, and if I couldn't find them, I'd try and find a reasonable substitute. One time I needed 1/4 cup of creme fraiche for something or other. These days, I'd either make my own or not sweat it and use cream or sour cream. Or yogurt. But back then, I pounded up and down the linoleum tiles in front of the dairy section searching for the stuff until I wore a groove in the floor. I finally asked a grown up wearing an official shirt about what to use as a substitute. He conferred with another grown up, and they decided that my best bet was to combine cream cheese, cream and sour cream. So I bought those items so I could use about a tablespoon of each. Lord. Years ago, when I still lived in a little crack house duplex, I decided I would make a buche de Noel for our family's Christmas dessert. Of course, I knew we'd also be having plum pudding and trifle, but I wanted to contribute, and I thought I knew what I was doing. I was wrong. Two crumbled chocolate "jelly roll" cakes later, I decided to throw in the towel and just make a Yule Stump with regular layers. This posed another problem. The cake recipe told me to use what I now know to be the two-stage mixing method. I did a terrible job with the mixing, partly because I didn't understand how the method worked and sort of thought that the folks who wrote it needed a good smack for not having me "cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy." Two peaked, stupid chocolate rounds later, I found a different recipe that asked me to cream things together and made that. Around 3am on Christmas day. I iced that bad boy with some chocolate frosting and drew some of it out to look like roots, spread custard on the top for the wood part and made a thin spiral of chocolate for the rings. I tucked in some plastic holly and some cocoa-dusted meringue mushrooms and slapped it defiantly on our Christmas table. I swear I looked like I had lived through The Lost Weekend. The cake tasted like desperation, but damn was it festive. Well, this guy is lovely. Show me how to make it.