Crêpe Cake (Gâteau de Crêpes)

I remember trying a crepe cake for the first time. With layers of paper-thin crepes and luxurious crème légère—pastry cream with whipped cream folded in—each bite was ethereal and lightly sweet, and I was determined to recreate it at home. Though the elegant dessert is a labor of love that requires both time and attention to detail, it’s worth making for a special occasion. While a project, it is much more manageable if you break the recipe into separate parts: make a batch of crepes; whip up some pastry cream; then stack it all together before brûléeing the top. It’s probably still easier than making and assembling all the components for a layer cake.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact origins of the crepe cake, or gâteau de crêpes. Some say the French chef Auguste Escoffier was the first to make it, but there’s no mention of the dish in his 1903 cookbook Le Guide Culinaire and little evidence elsewhere to suggest that the recipe was part of his repertoire. There is a recipe for gateau de crepes in Julia Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but it is a savory version that involves cream cheese, spinach, and mushrooms, and is served with a mornay sauce. The version that most closely resembles crepe cakes today is the one found in Larousse Gastronomique, which calls for stacking crepes with alternating layers of strawberry jam and chantilly cream.

In the past two decades, crepe cakes have exploded in popularity, likely thanks to Lady M, the bakery chain known for their signature crepe cake—what they describe as “the world famous Mille Crêpes.” With locations across the globe, Lady M sells the dessert in different flavors, including green tea, passion fruit, pistachio, chocolate, tiramisu, lavender, and strawberry swirl. A classic 9-inch Mille Crêpes will run you over a hundred dollars, so you stand to save a lot of money by making your own.

Do You Have to Rest Crêpe Batter?

In culinary school, all my French instructors insisted that it was necessary to rest crepe batter for at least an hour (if not overnight) to allow the gluten to relax. This, apparently, was the secret to tender crepes. But is there any truth to this? In their testing, both Daniel and Kenji found that resting the batter made no noticeable difference in how tender their crepes were, since the dilution of gluten-forming proteins in a wet batter is enough to severely limit gluten formation in the first place. If there’s any reason to rest your crepes, it’s to allow the starch to fully hydrate—which, while not necessary, offers a modest bump in viscosity and thickens the batter slightly.

How to Make a Luscious and Light Pastry Cream

Making pastry cream isn’t difficult: You simply whisk together whole milk, sugar, a starch like flour or cornstarch, and eggs in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring constantly until it thickens into a velvety custard before straining into a bowl and allowing it to cool. Making it well, however, does require some precision. When Serious Eats' former editor Kristina Razon developed her pastry cream recipe, she tested every major variable and found that yolks make a richer, thicker pastry cream than whole eggs, and flour produced a heavier result that tasted distinctly floury. Cornstarch, she found, created a pastry cream that had a clean, dairy-forward flavor.

For a pastry cream that sets up properly, it’s essential to take the custard just past 175ºF (80ºC), the temperature at which the starch granules begin to swell with water and gelatinize, thickening the mixture. Bringing the custard to a bubble after that and holding it there for a minute deactivates amylase, a starch-dissolving enzyme in yolks. If you’ve ever made a pastry cream that separated afterwards or began to weep, that’s the amylase breaking down the starch, and it’s likely you didn’t cook it long enough. Don’t worry about scrambling the eggs—there are several factors, including the milk diluting the egg proteins, that make it difficult for them to tightly bond and coagulate.

Next comes the easy part: To finish the filling for the crepe cake, you’ll whip heavy cream with confectioners sugar until stiff peaks form, then fold that into your cooled pastry cream to lighten it up, forming the lightened pastry cream known as crème légère.

Cooking the Crepes

The key to successfully cooking crepes is to tilt the pan immediately after adding the batter, swirling it around to form a thin, even layer. This will minimize (although not entirely eliminate) variations in thickness across the crepe. Unless you have a proper crepe pan and the kind of wooden spreader professional crêperies use to spread their batter, it’s unlikely you’ll have a perfectly even crepe. Once they're stacked and layered with crème légère, those slight imperfections will hardly be noticeable.

How to Stack and Assemble a Crepe Cake

Assembling a crepe cake is more or less the same as assembling any cake…there are just a lot more layers to build. The biggest thing to pay attention to is to build the layers as evenly and level as you can so you don't end up with a slumping tower halfway that looks like it's ready to stretch out on the floor for a nap.

Once stacked, the cake needs a two-hour rest in the fridge to help it set. After that it's ready for its topping—a bruleed layer of sugar that's caramelized with a torch to the point of crackling.