Christmas Log

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Beirut, 2008

in collaboration with chef Nicolas Audi

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Designing with food is in some ways, almost like designing a product.

Understanding how different foods and ingredients react, how they can be used, how quickly they age takes some experimentation, trial and error.

It is a question of learning about new materials. And that just concerns the outside of the product, in this case a Christmas cake designed for Nicolas Audi Catering. You then have to work on the inside of the cake, which requires a completely new approach, first tasting each ingredient on its own and then trying to imagine them in combination.

Developing this cake in collaboration with Nicolas Audi, a chef in his own right, proved to be a totally new and highly rewarding experience. The result was a very rational-looking Yule Log, totally unlike the traditional cake, which took a total of some 3 months to design, from start to finish.

A reworking of the traditional Yule Log, we eschewed the traditional interpretation – literally, a log-like cake – and created a simplified, rectangular representation instead, dusted with cocoa powder and topped with sticks of chocolate resembling branches. Leaves of fresh mint were scattered on its surface, lending the log extra veracity, as if it had just emerged from the forest.

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