Mille Crepes

With the season changing to fall, the kitchen beckons to Scott and me. Actually, it is NOT fall here with the 90 degree weather, and the reason the kitchen is beckoning is because we are too poor to go out and eat. Anyway, after flipping through the new Dean & Deluca holiday catalog, we were inspired to make a "chestnut mille crepes" cake. This cake is featured in Dean & Deluca year after year ( www.deandeluca.com ), selling for $110. It is made at an exclusive bakery in NYC called Lady M Confectioners. They do not like to give out the recipe, so after some internet searches and cookbook references we came up with a recipe that supposedly is very similar to Lady M's (although we will never know since we have never tasted the real thing.)
Basically, the cake is 20 layers of crepes, with a chestnut pastry crem filling between each and every crepe. When finished, the top is torched ala creme brulee style for a crunchy caramel layer. It is a lot of work, but well worth the effort. First we made crepe batter and let it sit before making 20 perfect crepes. Scott was the official crepe-maker (and they were all perfect). Then we made chestnut pastry cream. First I boiled and peeled the chestnuts and pureed them with a little oil. The pastry cream is a super healthy mixture of butter, egg yolks, sugar, millk, and vanilla. After heating the cream and cooling the cream and adding the chestnut puree, we then added a whole load of whipped cream to it (I know, you can feel your ateries clogging). So next we meticulously layered crepe/cream/crepe/cream twenty times, making sure the cream layers were thin and even. Whew! The result was worth it...it was awesome, definetely more pastry-like than cake-like. Mmmmmm...we'll make it again soon!