What's that cake?

This was Cake X!  It's not a mystery cake anymore, but it was one that I contemplated in making for someone's birthday.  The name of this cake is Mille Feuille Crêpes Cake.  Mille Feuille means thousand layers.

The cake is simply layers and layers (21 of them, specifically) of sweet and soft crepe, with sweet vanilla pastry cream sandwiched in between each.  I decided to play with the flavors a bit by adding fresh slices of strawberry between every five layers of crepe.

This was my first time making a crepe cake, so I was quite afraid that it would turn out very badly.  But hey, a cake's a cake.  Julia Child once said, "the grand thing about cooking is you can eat your mistakes."  And I concur.

In NYC, there is a bakery named Lady M, and its signature dessert is a Mille Crepe Cake.  People have swoon over this bakery, and truthfully, I'm very interested in trying it too.  But since I'm not in NYC, and at $40 for a 6" cake, I think my mille feuille crepe cake tasted pretty darn good too, even if I need more practice making it. ^-^  

If you are interested in making this cake too, then here is the recipe.  It is fun and easy to make; however, time consuming.  Try it out if you have time, and the best part is you don't even have to turn on the oven on a hot summer day.  The recipe also called for making the crepe batter and pastry cream the day before serving the cake.  Yay for do-ahead prep work!

So why didn't I go with this cake, instead of the normal sponge cake for the birthday cake?  Because I didn't really know how to frost it to make it nice and grand.  Also, I  didn't really want to frost it because you wouldn't be able to see the layers and layers of crepes.  This is more of a casual cake.

At least my little nieces and nephews got to enjoy a test run of someone's b-day cake!  ^o^