Perfect Endings Buche de Noel
$85 at Williams-Sonoma.com
This classic Paris-style buche is densely chocolatey — there's a chocolate genoise cake, chocolate ganache, and chocolate buttercream — but manages to avoid being cloyingly sweet. It comes with a packet of realistic-looking meringue mushrooms, which you can use to decorate the cake however you like.

Buche de Noel Cake
$100 at NeimanMarcus.com
An American take on the buche, this cake uses an airy chocolate sponge rolled with a raspberry-spiked chocolate buttercream and frosted with still more buttercream, with swirls of frosting piped to resemble knots and whorls. It's birthday-cake sweet, perfect with a glass of milk, and pre-decorated with fondant poinsettias — the real flower may be poisonous, but this version is perfectly edible.

Meringue Mushrooms
$14.95 at Williams-Sonoma.com
Buy a whole pint of the delicate meringue mushrooms from Williams-Sonoma's buche — they'll take your homemade cake to a new level, or you can use them to pave a store-bought version with a veritable sugar-mushroom explosion.

Make This Cake and Eat It Too Edible Decorating Set
$92.60 on Andie Specialty Sweets/Etsy.com
Your buche will be the most jaw-dropping in town with this comprehensive decorating set (pictured above right), which includes 9 assorted sugar-and-chocolate mushrooms, 11 pieces of sugar foliage (including exquisite ferns and fiddleheads), 3 candy acorns, and three tiny, perfect sugar ladybugs. (You can go lower-key by buying the elements separately: candy acorns, shiitake-style mushrooms, chocolate toadstools, and even candy snowmen.)