Monday, January 4, 2010

Mille Crêpes Cake, 2009-2010



Greetings New Citizens and Ye Olde Timey Readers!
I welcome everyone into the new decade, "twenty-ten."

This post will focus on my laborious attempt at:
or otherwise known as Mille Crêpes


I first saw a picture of this cake on Martha's website and its image has plagued me for several weeks.
Crêpe Cake: Make Me REAL
Nelle: Um, ok cake. But I don't have a crêpe pan like the one my mom uses…Can I attempt using my small nonstick saute pan?
Crêpe Cake: hahahahaha. NO YOU FOOL! You probably thought "mille" meant one million too. Well it means one thousand, idiot.

Enter Santa Claus.

So, then I says to the Crêpe Cake, I says: I SHALL CONQUER YOU. The eve shall be New Years. The time is now. So I began making 40 chocolate crêpes. One crêpe at a time. hahahhahahha O the MANIA that ensued.
It actually took me 2 days to complete this cake. Technically, Martha's cake called for 32 crêpes. WTF?? Ok, so I make a batch of the chocolate crepe batter and it busts out around 20 crêpes. So I make another batch and proceed to make 18 extra crêpes, which is fine because I had a couple of "hot spot" crêpes, aka burnt circles of batter. Which I ate, oh yes I did!!

Here is a neat stack of my creations

A hazelnut buttercreme is prepared for the filling. The preparation goes a little something like this….
  1. Read recipe;
  2. Attempt to locate something called "Hazelnut Cream" in my pantry, knowing its not going to be there;
  3. Fail to locate;
  4. Attempt to locate a Whole Foods in Wenatchee;
  5. Fail to locate;
  6. FU*K! Silently curse Martha.
So, I had to root around the internet for a suitable stand in for something called hazelnut cream. I came up with this and it worked fine. It definitely added extra steps to my cake making process and I believe the texture was a little more, oh…. come si dice in Italiano "rustic?"
I only say that because the hazelnuts I used for the cream were a little more chunky than a commercial brand of hazelnut cream would be. Nevertheless, here is the final product after layering crêpe upon buttercreme upon crêpe, topped with a dark chocolate ganache, garnished with candied hazelnuts;

I find splendor in these many layers
Todd didn't even eat any of it though! GRRRRRRRR
Half the cake remains in the fridge to taunt Todd.
BUT, I loved it and so did our dear New Years guests, Selina and Wenzel.
Onward 2010!!!!

1 comment:

  1. And I love it too, even tho I did NOT get a taste. The pictoral version will have to do I guess, tho I am somehow salivating and detecting chocolate aroma from my laptop...

    ReplyDelete