Taking cheap packaged ingredients and creating something fancier is a way of life. When it comes to desserts, it’s a way of life I fully support. For example, recreating an exquisite French dessert from a Snack Pack. Is it “authentic?” Well, let’s call it my authentic.

Making puff pastry from scratch is noble, but it’s also time-consuming. On a day like today, which happens to be Valentine’s Day, maybe making a beautiful dessert in a reasonable amount of time is more important than noble. Here’s the easy, inexpensive way to make a show-stopping mille-feuille that looks fancy and expensive. (Will this dessert show that your love is easy and inexpensive? I don’t know, but it does mean you’re smart.)

Mille-feuille, also known as Napoleon or vanilla slice, consists of puff pastry with a pastry cream filling and a topping. The topping can be a feathery fondant icing or a decorative dusting of icing sugar. The dessert is a delicate textural combination of puff pastry and creamy vanilla filling that melts in your mouth.

Making puff pastry, as I said, is hard work. The classic version is a laminated dough, which means that the layers of dough are striped with fat in a precise way. Even “quick puff” has a specific technique for rolling the dough, and it’s easy to mess it up. Pastry cream is basically vanilla pudding, but one where you have to cook the egg yolks carefully so that they stay smooth and not too coarse.