Daring Baker Past Challenge - Chocolate Crepe Cake

(NOTE: Final recipe for Nutella week will be up later today!)

Time for another round of Double Daring Bakers! This month we tackled the April 2007 challenge which was Martha Stewart's Chocolate Crepe Cake.

There was a lot of screaming done at this cake by the Daring Bakers back in April and we were warned about it! Lis, one of the co-founders of DB, had this to say on the topic:

"Daring Baker Administration is NOT responsible for any loss of hair, batter splatters on kitchen walls, nervous tics you OR your dog may develop, money lost in falling for the old "you need a French crepe pan and nifty crap spatula" scam to make this cake, uncontrollable crying and swearing or any emotional damage your uncontrollable crying and/or swearing has on family members OR pets if you should try making the Crepe Cake. :) May the force be with you."

No complaining, right? We were warned! Despite the warning, I decided to give it a go!

On the day I decided to make the cake I just so happened to only have 1 stick of butter in the house. Seriously, I always have AT LEAST 1 pound of butter on hand at all times. Well... that meant I would just have to cut the recipe in half. No harm, no foul. Who needs an entire chocolate crepe cake anyway?

According to the challenge rules we had to follow the crepe recipe and the glaze recipe but the filling was up to us. I was going to make a vanilla pastry cream but the butter dilemma made that not possible. Oh well... It is Nutella week, right? So, take a jar of Nutella and use that as a filling! The original recipe calls for a hazelnut filling, so I am sort of on the same wavelength, no?

I didn't really have any challenges with this recipe. My biggest issue with it is that it is freakishly time consuming. Even though I cut the recipe in half I still ended up with 25 crepes. I don't know how that happened considering the original recipe makes 32 crepes.

Making 25 crepes takes a while. It seems like an eternity, especially when you have a tired and cranky 5 month old who just wants you to finish the darn crepes!

Anyway, once I finally got the crepes finished everything else was rather simple. I just layered the crepes with Nutella and poured the glaze on top. The glaze didn't set as smoothly as I would've liked and when I cut it the top slid a bit, but no big deal.


The cake tasted very good but I highly doubt I would make it again. Too much fuss for not much reward. I would much rather have a single crepe with Nutella and a banana or a chocolate cake with Nutella frosting. But, hey, I completed the challenge and that alone was worth it to me!