In the summer of 2004, St Petersburg succumbed to Tarkan-mania. I was a student then, and among those who fell. It didn’t matter that nobody had any idea what the Turkish superstar was singing about; his hit song “Dudu”, racy and undulating, pumped out of coffee shops, hair salons and blini stalls at all hours of the day. It made a change, I guess, from the Ibiza-style club tunes that are the usual soundtrack to shopping for groceries in Russia.

It didn’t hurt that Tarkan Tevetoglu was seriously gorgeous. Not even the ox-like babushkas, built to last, were immune: everybody that summer shimmied their belly to Tarkan. You probably had to have been there, but here’s the video, should you want to see for yourself what all the fuss was about.

About a year ago I met a man who looked just like Tarkan. You know the kind of good looks that are so striking it’s almost vulgar? Well, Peoria, IL is not Constantinople, but his father was Turkish. It went nowhere, but not before he’d taken me for dinner at Gyu-Kaku in Cooper Square because he wanted me to taste their dessert.

I was sceptical. As Peter Meehan wrote this week, reviewing Soba Totto for the New York Times, “at the end [of every meal] there’s that humdrum Japanese dessert question — green tea ice cream or not?”

I needn’t have been. I was blown away. I’d done my usual on-edge princess act all through the meal (”So overseasoned”; “Oh, the state of Asian food in the West”), but when he watched me eat the matcha-flavoured Mille Crêpes cake, he knew he’d scored a victory. An impossible wedge of cold, thin, stacked crepes, inter-smeared with a custard cream so airy that I suspended my pastry training and forgot that there was a whole yolk in every bite.

Months after we stopped speaking, I remained obsessed with this cake. I tracked down the supplier, Lady M Confections, but didn’t really feel like going to East 78th Street, or shelling out 75 bucks for six dollars’ worth of ingredients.

Then, this January, two very dear friends of mine returned from their wedding in South Africa. I couldn’t be at the ceremony, so I threw them a little dinner at my house. (Here is where I take a deep breath and try, unsuccessfully, to refrain from typing out the anti-destination-wedding rant I’ve been delivering at increasing volume the closer I get to 30, as couples who’ve been living in sin for years suddenly decide, all in a cluster, that I owe them all my vacation days and spare cash. Did I mention I’m getting married right here in New York City? Or, for that matter, that I won’t be applying to have my wedding resumé published in the New York Times?) I knew I wanted to serve a cake for them to cut, but there was the issue of my not really liking cake, or believing in it as a dessert.

(Cake is all well and good in the middle of the day, with a nice cup of tea. But when you’re on your fourth course and have had two-thirds of a bottle of wine, I imagine you want a slice of cake like you want a plateful of Saltines spread with lard.)

What looks like a cake, cuts like a cake, but isn’t?

Mille Crêpes.

Oh, but I couldn’t possibly make that. Could I? I guess there was that one time I trailed at a restaurant and made fifty cornmeal crepes with the head chef watching over my shoulder. So I didn’t get the job. So what? The crepes were great. (The julienned leeks–not so much.) Twenty crepes - that’s nothing.

My 20-layer, 11-inch Mille Crêpes cake took three hours and eighteen eggs to make.

I followed a New York Times recipe by Amanda Hesser, who, like me, had been driven to distraction by a Lady M Mille Crêpes. Having tried, and failed, to obtain the company’s own recipe, Ms Hesser concocted her own. And very good it is, too, with a pastry cream base that can be infused with any flavour you like: the matcha that I first tasted at Gyu-Kaku, perhaps, or even lavender, to spread between chocolate crepes. But it’s no casual undertaking: in addition to the crepes themselves, which have to be perfectly circular and fork-tender, there’s a pot of pastry cream to be made, and strained, and chilled, and a bowl of chantilly cream to stiffen by hand if, like me, you have no electric tool to do it for you. The stacking and cementing, which the professionals have managed to shave down to six minutes, as the article reports, took me closer to 25.

I’ve made it twice now, each time to great acclaim. I like it served with cherry preserves and a sharp cherry sauce (Terrapin Ridge’s Two Cherry Squeeze is wonderful) to cut the richness a little.

Tarkan’s doppelganger is gone, but his dessert has become a firm part of my repertoire.

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