Crepe Cake with Orange Cream

I think my boyfriend James must be in an orange phase, because he's asked for two orange-flavored things in a row! This week he wanted me to make a crepe cake with orange cream. If you've never heard of this, essentially it's a multi-layer cake with alternated crepes and cream. I make crepes almost every weekend for breakfast, so I don't even use a recipe anymore. However, I wanted to come up with an idea for the cream, since I couldn't find a recipe I liked. I made one myself and set to it!

As you can see, making your own whipped cream doesn't require a lot! This is essentially all you need:

whipping cream

powdered sugar

orange

vanilla

salt

Doing this is really simple: just add all the ingredients into a bowl and mix. Below you'll find a picture I took just after I added the vanilla (what? I thought it looked cool!).

OK. Next comes the part that I didn't really consider too deeply: actually whipping the cream! Folks, when you buy "whipping cream" it's the consistency of milk, and through brute strength you must get it to that light fluffy stuff we buy to put on pie. Also, because I'd always pontificated that I never would need a mixer, I got the honor of doing it by hand. And maybe if you're lucky you can enlist the help of your man! :) What you're looking for are stiff peaks; essentially you're manually putting that air in the cream, so you want it to be more solid than liquid....like the picture below!

Then I refrigerated this and got to work on the crepes. For it to be a "cake" I needed at least 10 crepes....I went for 16 (because that's how much the batter made!). Even though I can fudge the recipe, I decided to do it by the book for these. What you'll need are:

eggs

milk

salt

flour

sugar

butter, melted

PLEASE NOTE that if you use a rough-cut or whole-wheat flour, you will need more of it than the recipe states! That's because the coarser grains have more area in which to suck up moisture. Making crepes is really easy too: simply mix all the ingredients in a bowl! I usually am lazy and simply fry these up in olive oil, but for this cake I did it in butter. PLEASE NOTE that you must add a little more butter to the pan before every new crepe! Also try to make sure your boyfriend doesn't use the 10" saucepan for something else...otherwise you have to use a deep pan, which is really difficult for flipping. Pour in just under 1/3 c for 10" crepes and then immediately pick up the pan and tilt it around to spread the batter. Cook until underside is lightly browned, then flip. See picture below:

For fun I also decided to add a little cocoa powder to the second batch of crepes to make it more visually interesting, if not in taste as well! This was my end result of crepes:

Then wait for them to cool a bit...and layer with the cream! If you don't let them cool enough, the cream will begin to melt (aka revert back to liquid form). Put up to 3x as much cream, width-wise, in between each crepe. If you have enough left over, frost the outside with cream too!

This needs to chill in the fridge from 6 hours to overnight. Then cut into wedges and enjoy!