Thursday, April 30, 2009

Chocolate crepes with fruit and yogurt


I got a crepe pan in November from an aunt. At first I thought it was kind of silly. I had never minded not making crepes. But it works really well, and I have had a lot of fun with it. I have made regular savory crepes, chickpea flour crepes, garlic scape crepes, regular sweet crepes, and now chocolate crepes. We had a lot of fruit salad left over from Jon's mom's visit, and I thought this would be a good way to use it up. I accidentally forgot to add the water, and the batter didn't spread as well in the pan as I would have liked, but they tasted pretty good anyway. Also, the recipe calls for 1/4 cup powdered sugar, and I used 2 tbsp regular sugar. It was not very sweet at all, which was fine with me since I was putting fruit in it.

Chocolate crepes, from Crepes by Lou Seibert Pappas
2 large eggs
1 cup milk
1/3 cup water
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp liqueur, optional (I used Grand Marnier, although I didn't get much of the flavor)
2 tbsp butter, melted.

Mix everything in a food processor. If you don't have one, mix the wet ingredients and dry ingredients separately and then whisk together. Cover and refrigerate 1-24 hours. (I don't know whether that is essential, but I always do it.) To make the crepes, stir the batter just to make sure nothing has separated. Then heat up your crepe pan over medium to medium-high heat. Pour about 1/4 cup of batter onto the pan, tilting to let it spread. Cook until mostly dry on top, usually under a minute. Then flip over and cook for 15-30 seconds on the other side. Fill as you see fit.

In case you were curious, the fruit salad contained apples, bananas, clementines, pineapple chunks, strawberries, raspberries, and sliced almonds. I thought the almonds were a stroke of genius. It's nice to have that little crunch every once in a while. And of course, the yogurt I used was my homemade plain stuff. I added 1/3 cup of powdered milk to the last batch, and I think it helped make the yogurt nice and thick.

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