Happy Pancake Day everyone! ~
I made this mega cute crepe cake for Valentine's Day this year (I will be dusting her off today!) and out of all the crepe cakes I've made over the last year, this one is definitely the best!
The recipe itself is simple but you will need some patience ^^'
Effort: 3/3
Ingredients:
2x Eggs
35g Sugar
75g Plain Flour
35g Melted Butter
250ml Milk
150ml Double Cream
150g Cream Cheese
30g Sugar
1tsp Vanilla
Let's Go!
1. Sieve the flour and sugar into a medium bowl and make a well in the middle - I say sieve but I'll be honest, I just weighed both straight into the mixing bowl and jiggled it! ^^'
2. Crack your eggs into the well and start whisking slowly.
3. Slowly add the milk in a steady stream and mix continuously until all the flour is incorporated.
OR you can whack it all in a mixer if you have one!
4. Once the mixture is smooth, whisk in the the melted butter.
5. I added 16 drops of red gel colouring but this is optional!
I forgot to take pictures of the process but once fully combined, you should have a very thin batter.
5. Heat a pan on medium and make your crepes! I have a 20cm frying pan (£4 from Morrisons) and since there's butter in the batter, I didn't use any oil.
6. Make your crepes and leave them to cool completely.
NOTE: this mixture makes 13 crepes in a 20cm pan. Depending on the size of your pan, numbers may vary. My crepe cake only has 12 layers because I ate one, heh.
7. Whip on high until the cream holds soft peaks then put it in the fridge to keep cool.
6. Whisk the cream cheese, sugar and vanilla (or any other flavour you want to use) until smooth.
7. Once combined, retrieve the whipped cream and gently fold it in. Here I only folded 3/4 of the whipped cream into the cream cheese because I wanted alternating layers of filling but you can mix it all in if you like! OR you ca even just do whipped cream!
8. To the whipped cream x cream cheese mixture, I added approx 8 drops of red gel colouring - this is also optional.
NOTE: Keep everything in the fridge until you're ready to build your crepe cake.
Assemble!
9. Put your first crepe on a plate - I made a mistake and built mine on a turn table. This makes the job harder, once again I'm casually making the mistakes so you don't have to!
10. Spread a layer of filling evenly over the crepe leaving a thin ring of naked crepe around the edge.
11. Stack the next layer of crepe and do the same with the whipped cream if you're doing 2 fillings like me. If not, just keep alternating between crepe and filling until you use up all your crepes!
12. Once your final crepe is on top, you can leave it there are you can scoop the rest of the filling into a piping bag and decorate.
13. Pop it in the fridge to chill and firm up.
Et voila!
My piping skills are on the wobbly side but on this occasion, I piped a shell border using a star tip and wrote 'Love You' in traditional Chinese because I'm still heavily in Chinese New Year mode.
Fun language facts!
I ordinally learnt to write simplified Chinese (I learnt to write through learning Mandarin) but I decided to write traditional because 'love' in simplified has no 'heart'.
心 - heart
Love - 爱 (simplified) vs 愛 (traditional)
And it's Valentine's so I want LOTS of hearts! So much that I have used the courteous version of 'you' because it has 'heart' in it.
You - 你 (normal) vs 您 (courtesy)
Realistically though, I would never say 愛您. I'm going to confess that this is solely for aesthetic reasons - HA!
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Costings
Eggs - 16p
Sugar - 2p
Plain flour - 2p
Butter - 5p
Milk - 18p
Double cream - 47p
Cream cheese - 37p
= £1.27
