Milk Chocolate Crêpe Terrine Recipe
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With milk chocolate sauce sandwiched between layers of crêpes, this dessert from Chef Stéphane Reynaud’s book Terrine has no faults.
What to buy: Vanilla sugar is granulated sugar that’s been perfumed with vanilla beans and seeds. It can be purchased at specialty food shops, or, to make your own, just bury scraped vanilla beans and their seeds in your sugar and store in an airtight container. A sachet is roughly equal to 2 teaspoons.
This recipe was featured as part of our Terrines Made Easy story.
Photo Credit: Charlotte Lascève
For the crêpe batter:
- 3 eggs
- 1 sachet vanilla sugar
- 300 g / 11 oz (2 3/4 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour
- 400 ml / 14 fl oz (1 3/4 cups) milk
- 25 g / 1 oz (2 tablespoons) butter, melted
- 1 tablespoon sunflower oil
For the chocolate sauce:
- 200 g / 7 oz milk chocolate, broken into pieces
- 100 ml / 3 1/2 fl oz (scant 1/2 cup) double (heavy) cream
- 20 g / 3/4 oz (1 1/2 tablespoons) butter
- Pinch of ground cinnamon
- Pinch of ground ginger
- To make the batter, beat the eggs well, then add the vanilla sugar and flour. Gradually stir in the milk and 200 ml / 7 fl oz (scant 1 cup) water. Finally, stir in the melted butter and the sunflower oil. To make the chocolate sauce, put the chocolate, cream, butter, cinnamon and ginger into a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water. Heat, stirring occasionally, until the chocolate has melted and the mixture has blended together. Keep warm.
- Cook the crêpes in a non-stick pan (skillet), making sure that they are very thin. Set aside in a warm place. When they are all cooked, brush them with the chocolate mixture and stack them on top of each other. Serve warm.
Beverage pairing: Dow’s Fine Ruby Port, Portugal. Port is always a good match for chocolate desserts, and you can generally go with either a tawny or a ruby. For this, a ruby port might be more refreshing. Ruby ports can be rich and dense as in a vintage or vintage-style, or they can be lighter and less substantial, designated by the simple term ruby on the label. In the case of this light and pretty terrine, the latter is a better choice. Served slightly chilled it will offer a refreshing wash after each bite of terrine.
Recipe from TERRINE by Stéphane Reynaud (Phaidon, $29.95), www.phaidon.com
This recipe, while from a trusted source, may not have been tested by the CHOW food
team.
It is The Lady M Cake Boutique at 41 East 78th Street. FN show, Sugar Rush, featured the bakery and its signature cake Lady M Mille Crepe™ on one its episodes. It is described on the bakery's website "...... with no less than 20 translucent paper thin, hand made crepes layered with feathery light cream custard."
I saw a refined version of this at a Bakery in Manhattan on Food Network a few years ago.
( When it wasn't the Food Challenge network :)
Does anyone out there know which Bakery that might be? i think its on the upper east side. Maybe its the west side ? haven't found it yet. Might as well make it this weekend.
I seem to remember. at the Bakery. they ironed very lightly after each layer. this made for a less Rustic look. and caramelized the sugar. tell me that doesn't sound good.
lots of work. but very happy ending. I wonder how some good raspberry jam would be between the layers. or Lemon curd.
Thin pancakes stacked up with chocolate wedged in between, then cut into slices like a layer cake? my grandma used to do this for me as a kid, but she used butter, brown sugar and cinnamon instead of chocolate. it was yum.
i'm wondering why, in the recipe for the crepe batter, the 'scant' cup of water doesn't appear . . . . . but in the following ' instructions' it does call for the scant cup of water, along with the milk. Just checking to make sure this isn't a 'typo' mistake, before I go ahead with the crepe making.
Thank you!
I hate hate to say this, but after following CHOW for a long time it seems way too much to me that the editors care too much about food being extravagent and not enough about the food being good. It all about making what should be simple delicious food into some convoluted concoction. I feel like all this food is hipster trash that you would attempt to make yourself after smoking some overly expensive weed.
crepe itself is great... but a tower/terraine of crepe!!! i cant wait until my bf makes it for me! =)
Great recipe, sparse on the details but it comes out well.
The only thing is that if you keep the crepes warm all of the chocolate/nutella filling will squeeze out the sides...so don't keep it to warm
I agree that this is a very poorly written recipe and a poorly executed product in the photo. The crepes are indeed too thick, which is why the calculations of Chuckles don't "stack up." A novice crepe maker would have no clue how to actually "cook the crepes," nor, as has been pointed out, that the batter should rest.
However, while "crepe terrine" may be a misnomer, it is not an oxymoron, which would require it to have some ineluctable internal contradiction. Since one could conceivably make a terrine involving crepes and chocolate sauce, it's not an oxymoronic name.
no one noticed that the ingredient list didn't include the cup of water called for in the recipe directions for the crepe?
>>"the reason they look thicker here is because the photo is very close in on the terrine."
OK, let's do some math. A sheet of paper is .002" thick. One thing we can easily tell from the photo is that the crepes are about 10 times thicker than the chocolate filling. Which means the chocolate filling at each layer is .0002" thick. The picture shows 20 layers. It's hard to tell the diameter of each layer, but let's guess maybe 12".
From the above, we can calculate the amount of chocolate filling used to create the pictured "terrine":
number of layers times area of a layer times thickness of a layer:
20 * ((PI * 6" ^ 2) * .0002") = .45 cubic inches ...
or roughly 1/4 ounce.
Which means that the recipe is calling for 40 times more filling than the photo shows. The math is right, so what is wrong?
It's hard to imagine how the chef of 'Villa 9 Trois in Montreuil, just outside of Paris' would make such a silly mistake of calling a crepe cake a terrine. He must not know any French.
http://www.chow.com/stories/10950
http://www.chow.com/stories/10949
'For me terrine is in your mind.'
But then, his mind is not mine, nor yours.
paulj
digkv and others are absolutely correct about resting the batter before making the crepes if you want the right texture and thinness. And nooooooo... Those crepes are just way too thick! If you want to see the cofrfect thinckness, look at this crepe cake: http://tinyurl.com/238mb9 It's the chocolate layers that are the crepe. The light layers are the banana filling. Now, those are thin crepes!
But what really bugs me is this "chef" calling this traditional dessert a "terrine." It is NOT! It is never cooked and/or chilled in a terrine and/or unmolded. It's just a plain old fashioned crepe cake. Stephane Reynaud seems to be cut from the same mold (pun intended) as chefs who list "carrot confit" on their menus. I just hate oxymorons. I really do... <sigh>
They now sell imported French crepes in some supermarkets. Have you ever tried to cheat that way?
I used to make crepes in crepe pans. But when you warm up the French store-bought version and roll-in your nutella, if you eat it while it's warm, it's really quite good.
I read that there's a bakery that sells this somewhere in the West side.
Sometimes, I've bought it from the Japanese bakery store on 41st street between Madison and Fifth. But it's not chocolate.
I love this stuff. I think I'll try it with store bought crepe and your sauce to save time.
Thank you.
Any thoughts on how long this might keep?
If those a paper-thin crepes, that must be a TINY piece!
A naughty shortcut is to buy a package or three of good-quality pre-made crepe, warm them in a hot pan, and make it with them.
When I make chocolate sauce, I always warm the creme and such over a double boiler to just below a boil, THEN pour it over my chocolate chunks, and wait for 5 minutes, THEN stir. I dunno, I find it works better.
smfoodie: the crepes in this recipes come out paper thin like crepes. the reason they look thicker here is because the photo is very close in on the terrine. try it out and enjoy!
I am with digkv - it is essential to rest the batter when making crepes. The crepes in this photo look way to thick - more like pancakes.
I've made the Martha Stewart version several times. Time consuming, but rave reviews!
Made mine with Nutella in between.
Care: amounts of Batter recipe will make about 6" ea. 100 thin crepes. Thats a lot for this Terrine, (and it's just a fancy word for 'Stack' (in this case), unless they are literally placed one on top of each other within a large cocotte/ramekin. But then how do you get them out ?
I've made a crepe cake before and yes, each layer in the picture is one crepe. It ended up being around 30 layers thick and was time consuming to make....but worth it! I made the cake with a caramel sauce vs. the chocolate because I thought (for lack of a better word) the "egginess" of the crepes matches perfectly with caramel (think flan). This is the recipe for the topping I used.
Combine 1 cup brown sugar, 1 cup whipping cream, ¼ cup light corn syrup, and 2 Tbsp. butter in heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Reduce heat to low and cook gently 8-10 minutes until thickened. Remove from heat, add 1 tsp. vanilla.
The directions aren't that descriptive and it seems like it requires a lot of critical thinking for the cook. Anyways, you should rest the crepe batter first for an hour: super important.
Also, chow in that picture, is each layer one crepe? Because that's a huge, thick crepe then or is it just the zoom feature?