Strawberry Lavender Mille-Crepe Cake Recipe

What’s better than a crepe? Layers and layers of crepes separated by light and tasty whipped cream, of course!

For this recipe, I really wanted to explore incorporating different flavors, so I’ll be making the crepe batter with strawberry puree and infusing the whipped cream with lavender.

I also felt particularly inspired by the mermaid aesthetic so I also tried to go for some bright and vibrant colors!

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The Ingredients

As with most of my baking attempts, I like to try to find even marginally “healthy” substitutes wherever I can, so long as they use pretty conventional ingredients (I’ll swap fats, but probably won’t use anything besides almond or all-purpose flour, for instance) So for this recipe, I tried to find a lighter crepe recipe alternative and found this recipe by Little Broken for crepes made with coconut oil.

The Baking Process

If you want any type of infused whipped cream, you’re actually going to need to get started the day before you want to make your cake!

I took the amount of whipping cream I wanted to use for my recipe and heated it over the stove on low-medium heat until the cream was hot and just barely starting to simmer. After taking it off the heat, I added in the dried lavender buds, gave the mixture a little stir, and let it sit overnight in the refrigerator. When I was ready to use the cream, I strained the buds out of the liquid and used the whipping cream as per usual!

Depending on how strong you want the flavor, you’ll want to adjust the amount of time you steep whatever you’re using for flavor in the cream. The longer, the stronger!

I loved the strong taste of the lavender and the slight sweetness from the powdered sugar gave the lavender whipped cream just the right balance of floral and sweet! To add an extra pop of color, I also added purple food coloring.

If you’ve ever worked with coconut oil, you’ll know that it’s actually solid at room temperature. And if you haven’t worked with it before, now you know! So when working with coconut oil in recipes, if you don’t want it to solidify and get back to being chunky, you’ll want to make sure that all the ingredients are room temperature or warmer. And even if you do this, there’s a chance that simply just with the time it takes to mix together the ingredients or cook your crepe batter, the oil will start to solidify. That’s okay! You’ll see these chunks in the batter, but just make sure to give it a good mix before adding it to your pan and it’ll melt right in!

So to me, I think pink, purple, and turquoise make a really nice mermaid-inspired look, so I split my crepe batter in two, turning one half pink and the other half turquoise. I also added a bit of strawberry puree to the pink half to get a hint of strawberry flavor. When I envisioned what my cake would look like, I wanted to have a cool ombre effect, so to achieve that I added an additional drop of food coloring to the batter after every two crepes.

I ran into a couple mishaps when I was first getting the hang of the crepe making, so a bit of your batter is probably going to need to be sacrificed as you get the hang of it! And remember, be patient! I initially had my stove heat at around medium to low-medium and because the crepe batter is so thin, it basically cooked on contact which made it difficult to spread the batter around. So keep it low and keep it even! I also found it a bit challenging to flip the crepes without a proper spatula, but practice makes better! So after a couple practice rounds and mistakes I ended up with about 17 8-inch crepes!

Now it’s time to layer up! It probably would have been a good idea for me to get a better sense of how I could evenly distribute my whipped cream before I got started. I also failed to realize until after the fact that the whipped cream layer should be thin enough to highlight the crepe layers, not so thick that it would impede them. So I actually ran out of whipped cream while I was building my cake!! I initially started out with 1 1/4 cup of whipped cream because I thought that would be enough, then proceeded to lay on the whipped cream at each layer. So by about layer 11, I was pretty much out of whipped cream that I wouldn't be able to finish the cake! (Oh no!)

I accepted my fate and finished up with a shorter cake than I had hoped. This also meant the ombre effect was less pronounced because I didn’t get to end on the most vibrant layers!

But, I just couldn’t let those extra crepes go to waste! So the next day, I actually prepped another 3/4 cup of whipped cream to make another, shorter cake with the rest of the crepe layers. This time I didn’t infuse it with lavender and actually just made a strawberry whipped cream using whipping cream and strawberry puree. This was also super yummy and the puree made the whipped cream a really cute pink!

The Results

I was initially pretty disappointed with the fact that I had missed the whipped cream proportions. But another way to look at this is that I now have two different flavors of crepe cake to enjoy!

Both colors were definitely cute, and I liked switching off between the pink and blue layers. I’d definitely like to do a better job at the ombre effect next time around!

The flavor of the crepe itself is very light and doesn’t have much sweetness to it. This may be because the recipe uses honey instead of sugar, but it’s really not too bad. If you’re more of a sweet tooth though, you may want to add more honey. So it looks like, at least for this recipe, the flavor really comes from the whipped cream. In both sets, I had pretty strong flavored whipped cream that dominated the cake and made it flavorful and lightly sweet. No complaints there though! Both whipped cream flavors were super yummy!

This recipe took a loooong time for me to make (as with most recipes, actually...) so it was pretty tiring, but I’d definitely like to try this again and do it right!!

What do you think, are you getting any mermaid vibes?

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Strawberry Crepes

Ingredients

ºoº 2 eggs (room temperature)
ºoº 2 1/2 cups milk (lukewarm)
ºoº 1/3 tsp salt
ºoº 1/2 tsp baking soda
ºoº 2 tbsp honey
ºoº 1 cup all-purpose flour
ºoº 2 tbsp coconut oil (liquid)
ºoº 1/3 tsp vanilla
ºoº 2 tbsp Strawberry puree (optional)

Directions

1. Heat your milk into the microwave for about 1 minute to make it lukewarm

2. Whisk together the eggs, then add the lukewarm milk

3. Mix in the salt, baking soda, and honey

4. Mix in the coconut oil and vanilla

5. Heat your pan over the stove on low heat

6. Add in a scoop of batter and swirl the pan until it thinly coats the bottom of the pan

7. Cook for about a minute or until the top is slightly undercooked but not runny

8. Flip the crepe to the other side and allow it to cook for about another minute

9. Transfer to a plate or cooling rack and repeat for the remainder of the batter

Notes

ºoº If your coconut oil is solid, you can melt it by microwaving it in roughly 20-second
increments until it is fully liquid
ºoº You may need to experiment with what the right amount of batter is in order to coat your pan
thinly and evenly
ºoº The amount of strawberry puree I added to the batter was not enough to have a noticeable
flavor. If you'd like the strawberry flavor to be stronger, you can add more
ºoº As I mentioned above, if you’re trying to do an ombre crepe cake, continue to add a drop of food
coloring every couple of crepes

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Lavender Whipped Cream

Ingredients

ºoº 1 cup whipping cream
ºoº 2 tbsp dried lavender buds
ºoº 2 tbsp powdered sugar

Directions

(To be prepared one day before)

1. Heat the whipping cream over the stove on low-medium heat until it barely starts to simmer/steam

2. Remove from heat and mix in the lavender buds to the cream

3. Cover and allow to cool for at least 20-30 minutes

4. Refrigerate for at least a couple hours to overnight

(Day of use)

1. Strain the lavender buds out of the cream

2. Whip the whipping cream in a chilled mixing bowl on high speed until it starts to thicken

3. Add in powdered sugar and continue to whip until it reaches your preferred consistency

Notes

ºoº This ingredient list isn’t the exact amount I used, but it follows the same proportions
ºoº To reduce the potency of the lavender flavor, you can strain the lavender after 20-30
minutes before refrigerating the cream to use the next day. Otherwise you can leave it in
overnight and strain it right before use

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Strawberry Whipped Cream

Ingredients

ºoº 1 cup whipping cream
ºoº 2 tbsp powdered sugar
ºoº 1/3 cup strawberry puree (unsweetened)

Directions

1. Whip the whipping cream in a child mixing bowl on high speed until it starts to thicken

2. Add in powdered sugar and continue to whip until it reaches your preferred consistency

3. Gently fold in the strawberry puree

Notes

ºoº This ingredient list isn’t the exact amount I used, but it follows the same proportions
ºoº You can add as much or as little strawberry puree as you’d like until you like the flavor