It's coming up on my boyfriends 29th birthday so annually he organizes a birthday camping trip with his friends and I organize our families to come over for some cake! I got all my duds in order early on this one, I made the facebook event a month ago so no one would have an excuse to miss it :) Something I noticed a couple days ago was that I made it for 5 pm. Although not inherently bad for a Friday evening I get off work at 4:30 and home is a half hours drive which means no prep time. I'll have to start earlier so I can leave earlier, oh well!
But this year we looked at cakes and he decided (slash was told, whatever) that he wanted me to make a crepe cake! So I looked at some recipes online and settled on a layered cake. This is the plan: three layer consisting of crepes, healthy nutella (experiment of almond butter, cocoa and honey) and coconut whipped cream.
I started with the crepes. I found a recipe online and started substituting a few things and before I knew it I wasn't really following the recipe anymore... oops! So here's the ingredients before I decided to try a healthy nutella:
For the crepes I started by adding the following to a bowl and whisking it with my immersion blenders whisk attachment:
1 c unbleached flour
2 T honey
2 eggs
1/2 c milk
1/2 t vanilla
Double yoke :o
Whisked till it was bubbly!
Then I slowly added another 1 c milk (I used 2%) while I whisked and then 1 t melted butter.
From here I prepared my cooking accoutrements:
Crepe pan (thanks mom!), spatula (later switched to a smaller one because this one didn't fit into the pan under the edge of the crepe) and a plate to receive cooked crepes!
I used about a third of a cup of batter each time, no oil since it's no stick ( oil just makes it difficult to spread the batter!!) and set the temp slightly lower than what you use for pancakes. Normal is 5/10 on the dial for me so 4 is perfect for spreading the batter before it starts to cook too thick.
Once your crepe starts looking brown on the edges like this one it's time to flip. Less than 2 minutes later I took the crepe off heat. I ended with a lovely stack of crepes:
From there I started on the "nutella".
I used the following ingredients all mixed together:
2 c almond butter
3 T cocoa
2.5 T honey
It turned out pretty good, just a little dry tasting and it looked sort of like chocolate icing:
So then I started on the whipped cream. It took some trial and error on the coconut milk but essentially I needed to find coconut milk with only two ingredients and no preservatives or emulsifiers and then leave it in the fridge 24 hours. One can seemed to separate more than the other but oh well!
I got my blender out and blended and blended and blended and when I tasted it it didn't taste so awesome so I added some vanilla powder. In case your not familiar with vanilla powder this stuff is awesome, it's made from ground vanilla beans according to the google but I think this stuff also had some sweetener in it:
This made the initial taste sweet and vanilla-y but the after taste was still that strong over powering coconut that just leaves your taste buds in shock. So we decided it would ruin the cake and the only other alternative I had on hand was knock off cool whip (this is the night before the party and I have to work all day the next day).
Needless to say the "nutella" was too thick and the crepes kept tearing and the dessert whip melted so my cake turned into a souped sandwich in an aweful hurry and at that point I had to admit my boyfriend had good reason to suggest I pick up a box of cake mix for a back up. I forgot to take a picture of the whole cake with the sparkler # 29 on top but here's a picture of what was left. It was a hit:
Saturday morning though I woke up and used that "nutella" warmed up a bit with some defrosted frozen fruit and some cool whip and made myself a bangin' breakfast! Add a cuppa with some Bailey's and I was cruisin :) Not a complete loss!
Have you ever gotten really excited and into a recipe only for it not to work the way you intended?
