Baking Bouchon - Recipe 99: Crepe Cake

I can't even count the number of Crepe Cakes that I've pinned on Pinterest (4).  They are made with multiple layers of crepes layered with sweet cream.  It seems to be a pretty popular and anything that has 20 layers of Pastry Cream in it has me sold.  This is the final recipe in the Cake chapter of the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook and I'm super excited about it.

I served this to some of my favorite ladies when I hosted my last book club gathering at my house a few days before the movers showed up.  As usual, it was a fun get together where we caught up on everything going on in each other's lives and the lives of our favorite celebrities.  We also spent at least 5 minutes discussing the book that we read.

A crepe cake obviously starts with a bunch of crepes.  I've only made crepes on one other occasion and the batter seems pretty similar to those I made before.  It is made up of what you'd typically put in pancakes - flour, sugar, eggs, milk and butter.  Plus it contains a tiny bit of triple sec to give them a mild orange flavor.

Crepe batter is very runny which allows it to spread out in a very thin layer in a non-stick skillet.  They're so thin I was worried about ripping them when I flipped them but that did not happen - yeah!

Making this cake required making nearly 20 crepes so there was a lot of pouring batter, swirling batter and flipping crepes.

While the crepes are lovely, the star of this dessert is the orange diplomat creme that is layered in between them.  The diplomat creme is pastry cream scented with orange peel, stabilized with gelatin and folded with whipped cream.  (I talked more about diplomat cream and my love affair with it in the post about dulce de leche eclairs.  My loved has not faded with time.)

The layering process took a little bit of time but is totally worth it.

I was so excited slicing into this thing and I was not disappointed.  This cake is awesome!  The crepes are nice and light and the orange diplomat cream is rich and creamy.  YUM!

Let's recap the cakes in this book, shall we?  I don't remember disliking any of them, but there were a few stand outs...

• This crepe cake for sure - it was freakin' good.
• The Oh Ohs didn't turn out perfectly, but they sure were a a tasty version of the Hostess Ho Ho.
• Bouchons were tasty little brownie bites.
• The Palet d Or was probably my favorite.  It had amazing chocolate flavor and looked so pretty and sophisticated.

Considering that 3 out of 4 of my favorites contain chocolate, I guess there's a trend.

Enjoy!
Julie