AT HOME | OREO MILLE CRÊPE CAKE

A mille crepe cake is a French dessert, made of many crepe layers sandwiched with alternating layers of pastry cream. The word mille translates to "a thousand," signifying the sheer amount of crepes required to create this architectural masterpiece.

Inspired by the mille crepe cakes served at Island Cafe & Bistro (review here), I decided to go ahead and attempt my own at home! Thankfully it wasn't a total disaster.

The recipe I followed is courtesy of Eugenie Kitchen, who also has a step-by-step YouTube video.

For the chocolate crepes, the ingredients you will need are:

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tbsp cocoa powder
• 2 tbsp granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp melted unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup milk 

The recipe makes about 10 small crepes. I doubled the recipe so that my cake would be taller (and much more impressive).

 Mix all the dry ingredients together first.

And then add the wet ingredients and whisk everything together. It's a pretty fool-proof recipe, although I found that I needed to add a few more splashes of milk to thin the batter out. From past experience with making crepes, it works better if the batter is quite thin (almost like the consistency of gravy) so that it spreads around the pan more evenly.

And then it's crepe making time! A couple of tips: cook the crepes over a low heat, and definitely use a non-stick pan. I also painted a thin layer of melted butter before I poured the batter in. More butter wouldn't hurt right?

(Only your waistline, but everything in moderation.)

You know it's time to flip when the crepe becomes a touch dry on the surface. It literally takes less than 30 seconds each side.

Basically repeat the process until you run out of batter. It may not be a thousand crepes, but this is definitely the most time-consuming part of the recipe.

Once you have amassed your tower of crepes, set them aside to cool and begin working on your filling.

In my case, the filling was a simple whipped cream. Ingredients are:

• 1 1/3 cups whipping cream
• ¼ cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

A few minutes at high speed, and now you have a fluffy cloud of deliciousness.

Assembly line time:

A 10" cake board (though an ordinary plate would do), a mountain of crepes, whipped cream, and oreo baking crumbs. You can totally crush up regular oreos to get rid of all your pent-up frustrations.

I laid down a bit of a whipped cream on the board as glue so that the cake wouldn't slide around afterwards, and then slathered a spoonful on the first crepe using an off-set spatula.

Sprinkle oreo crumbs onto the whipped cream, and then (rinse, lather, and) repeat.

It won't look like the prettiest thing in the world at first, but I ended up covering the whole thing in whipped cream and oreo crumbs anyways.

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of a slice since this cake was made especially for a special group of people (Hi HVDC team!), but here's a photo taken on my phone of my first attempt at a mille crepe cake. Excuse the excessive filtering.

Not too shabby eh?

- CT