Welcome to Kitchen Queries, where the nigella.com team will answer your cooking or food related questions.  We’d love you to submit some of your recipe problems, dilemmas or queries for us to get our teeth into!

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• Crepe Cakes

  I have always wanted make a crepe cake but don't know to make the filling for the cake - such as hazelnut or vanila spread. Can you all help me on this? Thanks a lot for your help.

  Posted by SamuelKing. Answered on 10th Mar 2012 at 12.00

  From the nigella team:

  A crepe cake is made by stacking up crepes (thin pancakes) with a filling in between each layer. These cakes are particularly popular in America. Crepe cakes can be made in a multitude of flavours - some people even like to flavour the crepe batter. You will need 15 to 20 crepes (20-23cm/8-9-inch diameter) to make a cake

  The filling needs to be a fairly thick mixture which will set in the fridge so that the cake can be sliced fairly easily. If you wanted to make a hazelnut filling then we would suggest using a mixture of chocolate hazelnut spread (such as Nutella) and mascarpone cheese, plus a little icing sugar. We would guess at about 250g (9oz) of each. You could also fold in some melted dark chocolate. Otherwise you could try using a creme patissiere or a tiramisu cream mixture as the filling.

  You don't have to cover the cake with a frosting but if you would like to then a chocolate ganache (a mixture of chocolate melted with cream) is probably easiest as it should easily dribble down the sides of the cake and can be spread farily easily.

  For creme patissiere and chocolate ganache recipes we would suggest looking at Nigella's Boston Cream Pie recipe from Domestic Goddess (p 22). We would guess at needing a double quantity of the creme patissiere for a crepe cake filling and a single quantity of the icing for the top and outside of the cake.

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