Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Homemade Crepes

Another one of the reasons I hadn't posted in a long time that I didn't mention was that, almost immediately after I returned from California, my friend Raelynne came to Florida to visit me.


She hadn't visited me before, so I had a lot of fun taking her to see all the local sights.  Raelynne studies foriegn languages (she speaks English, Spanish, German and French!) and spent some time in France recently.  While there, her French friend taught her to make homemade crepes.  I told Raelynne that if she stayed with me, she definitely had to teach me to make crepes!

First, we bought a crepe pan from William-Sonoma, which is one of my favorite stores! :)  Then we got cooking.  Raelynne mixed up a beer batter crepe recipe that she wrote down while in France.  I don't have the exact recipe now because I didn't make a copy, and it's just as well since they don't make some of the ingredients here in the U.S.  But if you're interested, it's similar to this beer batter crepe recipe from Allrecipes.com.

Next Raelynne taught me how to cook the crepes!  It's hard, but not as hard as I'd always been led to believe.  You're supposed to pour a very thin layer of batter into your pan and then, using your wrist, rotate the pan so that the batter spreads around into a circle.  All of this should be done within 35-45 seconds!  If you don't have your wrist movement perfected, then your batter doesn't spread all the way into a circle because it's already finished cooking on that side!  Note that you only want a very thin layer in the pan, so the thinner your batter is, the better.  We ended up adding more milk to help thin out our batter.  Since my wrist action wasn't perfected, my crepes were more amoebas than circles.

Once that side is done cooking, it's time to flip your crepe.  Raelynne taught me to actually flip the crepe in the air, which was the most fun part of this whole process!  First she demonstrated (sorry, I didn't catch any of her flips mid-air):
                                     

Then I gave it a try.  It took a few attempts, but I finally got it!  (Excuse the jammies...we'd been to the beach that day and I felt like lounging around comfortably!)



And I was so proud! 


 Monica (my dog) was very interested in the whole process, so I asked her if she wanted to try and flip a crepe, too, but she did not.

 

When they were all finished, they looked like this:


For more, read on after the break. :) 

We made a "crepe station" and filled the crepes with strawberries, whipped cream and Nutella.



Raelynne had bought some wine to eat with her crepes, but when we got home I realized I didn't have a cork screw because I don't drink any alcohol.  We tried to knock on my neighbor's door, but she wasn't home, so we ended up opening the wine bottle like this:







Resourceful!  We had a good laugh about that, but we finally we got the wine bottle open and enjoyed our delicious crepes!  (Raelynne said the wine wasn't so good, which is how it got used as natural Easter egg dye later...)


All in all we had a really good visit.  It'd been three years since we last saw each other, so I really enjoyed going to the beach, out to eat, to the aquarium and the historic district with Raelynne.  But the night of crepes, movies and girl talk was definitely my favorite part!

Miss you Raelynne! :)

1 comment:

  1. I agree, that was the most fun part of my trip!!! I love your post about our Crepe Making Adventure!

    ReplyDelete

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