Mille Crepe Cake Recipe

I have always enjoyed the simple pairing of cream with pastries; strawberry shortcake and this time round, Mille Crepe Cake.

What is a Mille Crepe Cake? It is simply put, a cake with many layers of crepe sandwiched with cream. A crepe is paper-thin pancake made out of flour, eggs, sugar and milk. For the filling, you can use freshly whipped cream, pastry cream/custard or a combination of both as I did.

Mille crepe cakes are challenging because of the amount of time needed. You need to chill the crepe batter for at least 8 hours before use (to allow gluten to form) and spend a fair amount of time perfecting a paper-thin crepe over the stove.

My inspiration is from nasilemaklover's Mango Mille Crepe. Do read some of my observations below before trying out the recipe.

(makes 8-inch cake)

Ingredients

For crepes (makes about 23-25 pieces)
6 eggs
1L full cream milk (I used EMBORG)
300g all purpose flour
90g unsalted butter

For filling
*refer to my previous posting on how to make homemade pastry cream

Method

1. Heat butter for 30-40 seconds in microwave till melted. In a large bowl, whisk eggs and pour in milk and butter. Sieve in flour and mix well. Sieve mixture and keep chilled in fridge for at least 8 hours

2. On a middle fire, heat up non-stick saucepan and brush pan with thin layer of oil. Pour a laddle of crepe batter onto pan and cook for about 1 minute. The crepe is done when there are many small bubbles on the crepe and one side is lightly browned. You do not need to cook the other side of crepe.

3. Once the crepes have cooled, spread a layer of cream on each crepe, layering your way up until you have finished your cream. If you have extra crepes, you can eat them separately with jam or other spreads.

Tips

You can use store-bought pre-made crepes instead of making them from scratch.

Experiment with different flavours to give you chocolate, green tea crepes, etc.

To caramelise the top, sprinkle some brown sugar and torch lightly with hand-held blow-torch. Otherwise, decorate the top of cake with icing sugar.

Observations

I had way too much batter and ended up with too many crepes. There wasn't enough pastry cream to go around. Next time, I will reduce the batter portion by half and increase the amount of pastry cream.

Crepes should be as thin as possible. One big ladle of batter should be just about the right amount.