Crepes au chocolat

One of the things that always impresses me most about France is the crepe stands.

Wandering the streets? Doing some sight seeing? Hungry? It doesn't seem to matter where you are, there is someone close by selling crepes out of a traveling food cart or little hole-in-the-wall cafe. You can get them filled with anything you want. Formage? Oeufs? Nutella? Chocolat? You name it, they have it; and,while savory crepes are a nice treat, my favorite has always been crepes au chocolat.

The reason I always found the crepe stands so impressive is that it seems like such a mysterious process to make a crepe. From an American perspective they are a foreign dish, and not just foreign but French. Thus must be very difficult to cook. And something so clearly complex is not what you would expect to be vended out of a street cart. The secret is that most classic french dishes are painfully easy to make, and crepes au chocolate are only a few minutes and a hot pan away.

From: The 1000 Best Recipes (a cook book Dennis bought before I knew him and still comes in quite handy)

For the sauce:

1/4 cup butter
3 Tablespoons cocoa powder
1 cup brown sugar

Put in pan on medium heat and mix until butter is melted and ingredients are combined. Add slowly-

1 1/4 cup whipping cream (you could use milk, but if you do add some plain or vanilla yogurt for thickness)

Stir the mixture until it comes to a boil. You now have a delicious sauce that is great on crepes or ice cream, or anything else you might need a homemade chocolate sauce for. Keep the sauce warm while you make the crepes.

For the crepes:

This crepe recipe can be made and served with anything, if your doing desert crepes (like this recipe) you can add a teaspoon of sugar--though it's not called for in the recipe. You can fill them with jam (we had the leftovers with jam for breakfast) or sprinkle them with sugar. Or if you want savory crepes you can add a bit of salt, and some chopped herbs to the batter and serve the crepes with cheese, roasted veggie, chicken, or mushroom filling. The possibilities for crepes are endless. I read somewhere recently that almost every culture has a pancake (meaning a flat bread cooked on a stove or open fire that you put toppings on or in). The Mexican version is tortilla, and like tortilla, crepes can be filled with just about anything.

Combine:
3 eggs
1 cup milk
3/4 cup water

Once this is relatively well mixed (it does not have to be uniform, its alright if there are still some eggy bits) then put 2 cups of flour in a separate bowl and hollow out a hole or well in the middle. Pour your egg mixture into the well and then gradually stir with a spoon or whisk. This is the trickiest part of crepes, you want to get the ingredients combined without beating too much as beating develops the gluten in the flour. This is good for bread, but bad for crepes. Your crepes will still taste good if this happens, they will just be chewier.

Once your batter is smooth carefully stir in 1/4 cup of melted butter.

Heat up an 8 inch non stick skillet or crepe pan and grease it lightly with butter. When the pan is hot (to check flick a drop of water on the pan, if it sizzles, its hot) pour 1/4 cup of crepe batter into the pan. Pick the pan up and swirl the mixture around to coat the surface evenly like you would an omelet. You should be cooking the crepes on medium low to medium heat, depending on your stove. When the edges of the crepes start to curl up and the surface no longer looks wet then take a large spatula and carefully work it under to flip the crepe. They are very thin so it is necessary to be gentle with them. Cook the crepe on the other side just briefly (usually about 45 seconds) until browned. When done place it on a plate, you can stack the crepes up as you cook, but place a piece of wax paper or plastic wrap between them to keep them from sticking to each other.

When done take a crepe, spread some chocolate sauce on it, fold the crepe it into quarters, and pour, per the recipe, 'a generous amount' of chocolate sauce on top. You can sprinkle with powdered sugar, add whipped cream, or a scoop of ice cream to the top. Eat. Enjoy.

In case your still skeptical and think that crepes are difficult I'll have you know that this last time, when these pictures were taken I did not actually make the crepes au chocolat. Dennis did. And its not that he is incompetent in the kitchen--far from it. But he is slightly traumatized by anything that looks like a pancake (he had too eat too many of them as a kid) and much more comfortable grilling or cooking in the manly realms of meat. Now, he had just watched Alton Brown's Good Eats episode 'Crepe Expectations', but one night when I asked him to make desert, he pulled out one of his old cookbooks, found this recipe, and made delicious crepes au chocolate.