Chocolate Hazelnut Crepe Cake

If you haven't heard of a crepe cake, or a mille crepe cake (made famous by the Lady M bakery in Manhattan), then you're in for a treat.

As you can see, it's layers of crepes stacked together with cream in between each layer. What you can't see is that the crepes are brown-buttery and light-as-air, and the cream filling is a hazelnut pastry cream.  All topped with a semi-sweet chocolate ganache. Yeah. It's serious stuff.

It took a while for my hazelnuts to turn into the clumpy powder that they needed to be for the pastry cream, but besides that it was fairly simple to make.

My baking style is a bit haphazard, so sorry for all of the things in this picture. Once you make the crepes (I ended up with around 18 after eating two that had "broken") it's time to stack them up with the pastry cream.

Ta da! How pretty is that?? And no baking required! This cake isn't super sweet, so if you have a major sweet tooth (like me), then you'll find yourself wishing that it was filled with alternating layers of nutella and marshmallow fluff. But hey, that's just me. You can find this wonderful recipe in the The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. If you haven't heard of The Smitten Kitchen, then I'm doing you a favor. Go click on over and soak up all the perfectly-crafted recipes that Deb (it's creator) has to offer.