Pancake trial #1

The first thing that needs to be mentioned is that I broke the #1 rule when it comes to cooking in the kitchen- don’t do too much at once. So it probably wasn’t the best day to start frying up something new in the kitchen but it was Shrove Tuesday, I just told everyone about my New Year’s resolutions and I had to eat something for breakfast anyway. Simultaneously, I also had to make two different types of lasagne to feed 6 people and two separate lunches all before going to work, not to mention I had also slept in. A work friend had given TimmyC his favourite pancake recipe, so that’s where I started first. The recipe is from the Queen of food porn herself, Nigella Lawson and because I had zero idea, I followed it to the tee (to the best of my ability).

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Nigella Lawson’s American Breakfast Pancakes

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 teaspoon white sugar
• 2 large eggs (beaten)
• 30 grams butter (melted and cooled)
• 300 ml milk
• 225 grams plain flour
• butter for frying

Method

1. The easiest way to make these is to put all the ingredients into a blender and blitz. But if you do mix up the batter by hand in a bowl, make a well in the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar, beat in the eggs, melted butter and milk, and transfer to a jug: it’s much easier to pour the batter into the pan than to spoon it.
2. Heat a smooth griddle or pan on the stove.
3. When you cook the pancakes, all you need to remember is that when the upper side of the pancake is blistering and bubbling it’s time to cook the second side, and this needs only about 1 minute, if that.
4. I get about 16 silver-dollar-sized pancakes out of this.

I had thrown all the wet ingredients in my mixing bowl before remembering to make a well in my dry ingredients, which might account for the small butter clusters that I had, or maybe I didn’t cool it enough? I transferred my pancake mixture in a jug to allow for easy pouring and less mess, this is one thing I learnt from all the ‘pancake shake’ bottles. I found that I had to constantly change the heat of my pan to avoid burning my butter or pancake, although there was one time I was not paying attention and my pancake was a little browner than I would have liked. For me, this made around 10x 10cm diameter pancakes, which was good because I didn’t want to be eating pancakes of the next few days. I was amazed about how well this mixture cooked and made flipping the pancake super easy. I would definitely try this recipe again and maybe pay more attention next time. The yellow lumps don’t look promising but I’m frying them up anyway!Bubbles are forming, that’s a good sign.50 shades of brown, all the various pancakes that I made that morning, you can tell which one I left on a little too long. I don’t love the look of the crispy edges, but sure do love the texture of them. Of course I did the foodie cheat thing and put the prettiest pancake on top of my stack and instagrammed it immediately. 0:) These pancakes tasted pretty good with just maple syrup but next time I might make cinnamon mascarpone, because everything tastes better with cimmon mascarpone. The first thing I needed to do was prove to myself that I could flip a pancake without it breaking into a million shards (the last pancakes I made were from a recipe I saw on instagram; tasted delicious but looked like I was trying to pan fry sloppy soggy oats. Recipe: 1 banana, 1 egg, 1/4 cup rolled oats, 1/4 tsp baking powder, pinch of salt, and some cinnamon. Blend until smooth, fry spoonfuls of batter in butter) I can only improve from here.

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