Sweet Melissa Sundays - French Pancakes

Good Morning! I went on the wild side and created a savory dinner with Jaime's choice of French Crepes for our SMS weekend. Jaime's blog site, Good Eats and Sweet Treats, has the recipe for these delicious, tender, but not overly sweet crepes on her blog or we can say what we tell everyone every week . . . buy Melissa's cookbook!



My dish, if you are curious by now, is Julia Child's Timbale de Crepes (Molded French Pancakes) with a Crab creme filling and her lovely, packed full of butter, Bearnaise Sauce; but lets start with the crepes.

I used both my 10-inch and 6- inch crepe pans to assemble Julia's timbale. Melissa's crepe batter recipe is a good one. The batter swirled around and was thick enough to flip without the crepes being to soft and fragile.

I had plenty of batter to get all my crepes made.


Bought one Dungeness crab, of course we asked to have the nice lady clean said crab. My stomach does major flip flops cleaning out the crab butter.


The 10-inch crepes are cut in half and create the shape of our mold using a 1 1/2 quart mold. The smaller crepes are used for layers. The creme crab filling, using dry white wine, minced shallots, butter, milk, a little of my homemade clam juice stock, 1 egg yolk and 1/4 cup Swiss cheese is whipped together.

The Bearnaise sauce is assemble while the molded timbale bakes.

I inverted the French timbale onto a platter, layered on Bearnaise sauce and we are ready to slice into the mold, curious of how pretty this will turn out. My first time baking a mold timbale! Anticipation is so much fun.



Larry went to find wine to go with dinner and we did not have a decent white wine to accompany a seafood dish. While dinner was baking, he actually ran out and bought a nice Chardonnay.

I simply adore Julia child and the Movie Julia and Julie. That crazy Julia really knows how to make a mess in the kitchen to create the ultimate masterpiece! The dish turned out to be so good that, even completely full, we did not want to stop nibbling. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is truly an amazing adventure in the cooking world!