Crespella Part Deux

A few days ago I posted the recipe for Oven Crespella with Chocolate Sauce from Gourmet Magazine. Well, DH and I have been talking a lot about it over the last week, and we collaborated a new way to use the recipe. So, yesterday DH made this new version of Crespella as a celebratory cake to mark our one year anniversary of healthy eating. OK, so maybe eating a cake is not exactly most logical way to celebrate healthy eating. But, this cake has no refined ingredients, barely any sweetener, etc because of the modifications we made. Yes it is still high in calories and fat, but we are sharing it with friends, and we are not feeling guilty eating it.

We call the cake Crespella Cream Pie. To assemble, make two crespellas and some of Dorie Greenspan's Vanilla Pastry Cream and your favorite recipe for chocolate sauce, frosting or ganache. A note on the pastry cream recipe: I personally don't feel it needs so much sweetener. The whole milk and vanilla bean already give it a rich flavor, so I usually just use two tablespoons of maple sugar or agave nectar to sweeten it.

To assemble:

1. Place one of the crespellas on a cake plate.
2. Spread the pastry cream on top.
3. Arrange slices of banana over the pastry cream.
4. Spread some of the chocolate sauce onto the bottom of the other crespella and lay it on top of the bananas. That will help glue the bananas in place once it sets in the refrigerator.
5. Then either frost the cake with the rest of the chocolate sauce immediately or after the cake has set in the refrigerator. In Florida where I live, it is sometimes so humid that refrigerating first helps the cake keep its shape while frosting. Then store the cake in the refrigerator.

Either serve cold or at room temperature.