Tag Archives: pancakes

Super fluffy pancakes with cherry berry compote

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There are a few reasons this blog exists. Doing the day job I do, it’s nice to have somewhere to write fluffier (all puns intended) pieces. It’s a nice repository for recipes I’ve tried and liked (hence all the notes to myself, at times) and it’s also somewhere for my children to look up family recipes.

I didn’t have that. All the things my grandmothers (nonne) or zie (aunts) made have gone with them. My mum is still alive, thank goodness, but she now doesn’t really remember what she put in what. None of my female relatives ever wrote anything down. (The men in my family didn’t tend to cook. Although my dad made the best fried eggs and he did show me his tricks!) Perhaps they didn’t have time, perhaps they wore the whole “I don’t follow a recipe” thing as a badge of pride. Perhaps it helped them regain control in a world where they they had little control, with no economic independence (not talking about my mum here but those before her) and having to push out baby after baby all in the name of religion. Perhaps having ‘no recipe’ to follow meant that, were they mightily pissed off, as they must have been at times, meant they could at times sabotage things. Adding more or less of an ingredient that someone did/didn’t like.

You take it where you can.

But I am lucky. Thanks to my feminist mum I am financially independent but I do need to follow a recipe and as my eldest starts to grow up, and thoughts of her leaving home settle on the horizon, it’s nice to think that she can, should she so wish, look up recipes for things she enjoyed at home.

These super floofy pancakes as we call them are beloved of my youngest who isn’t a fan of super thin crepes or my oatmeal pancakes so occasionally I make these just for her and every time I have to hunt the recipe (originally from BBC Good Food) down.

Ingredients (This recipe makes enough for about ten regular sized pancakes, enough for three of us, if you want an abundance or there are more of you, then make double. The mixture keeps happily in the fridge for a day or two).

for the pancakes

175g white self raising flour, don’t even think about adding wholemeal here

1 teaspoon of baking powder

A sprinkle of cinnamon

1 teaspoon of caster sugar

1 large egg

75g of buttermilk or yoghurt

165ml of milk

for the compote if you wish

A tin of 150g cherries and berries in natural/light/syrup – don’t sweat it you can work with any of it. You can of course also use fresh or frozen berries if you have them, just cook the latter for longer. If using fresh add a tablespoon of water into the pan.

Method

the compote

Empty the tin of cherries and berries into a saucepan and warm through until gently bubbling. Depending on the juice the berries came in you may need to put half a teaspoon of cornflower to thicken it up. What you want to ideally end up with is a thickish syrup. Tinned fruit takes the least amount of time, fresh a bit longer, frozen the longest. None of it should take too long though, you want the fruit to still have shape but be soft and the syrup to be thickish.  Set aside to eat in a moment. I make the pancakes whilst this is bubbling in the background.

for the pancakes

You literally just tip all the ingredients into a bowl one by one as they are listed and give it a good whisk until there are no lumps or bumps.

Heat up a skillet or frying pan, I dribble a tiny bit of oil on and then brush the pan with my silicon pastry brush. Note a natural pastry brush will melt so don’t do that. You can just try to get the oil to cover the pan. You really don’t need much oil at all. Perhaps on a non stick pan you need none at all, but I don’t use non stick pans.

When the pan is hot, you dollop about two tablespoons (I have a small ladle from Muji which is perfect for this) onto the frying pan, on mine I can do three pancakes at a time. They don’t need much time at all to cook, maybe two mins per side. I like how the second side tends to puff up as you turn onto it.

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I have mine with Greek yoghurt and the compote, my daughter has it with chocolate hazelnut spread, my husband has his with compote, banana and chopped nuts. My eldest doesn’t like them.

 

 

 

Ali’s oatmeal pancakes

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Ali is someone I’ve known for about, ooh, nine years. I ‘met’ her on line via I Want My Mum, which was a parenting forum I used to co-run. I’ve never actually met her but we seem to share similar tastes in certain foods and I always look at her recipes with particular interest.

She shared this recipe for oatmeal pancakes which I wanted to try. We’ve been making these pancakes for a good few years now. And whilst I love them, and they do contain fruit, I’m aware they have a lot of flour in them. Even though we now always make them with half white/half wholemeal, we always seem to be starving a few hours after eating them and without wanting to sound like a carb bore, if I have these for breakfast, and say a sandwich for lunch, I feel really carbed out.

But! Ali’s pancakes are mostly oatmeal which is so good for you. They do contain a bit of flour but not much comparatively. You do need to make them the night before, but I don’t actually mind this now that I am an organised mother-type and not a rock and roller who traipses into the house at 4am wanting immediate carb satisfaction.

But anyway, my friend Emily has also reported great success with just warming the milk and oats up the morning you make them, so you could also try that.

I was almost quivering with hunger when I made these on Saturday morning so too greedy and impatient to take a pic. We served ours with live yoghurt and blueberries and strawberries. And maple syrup.

The recipe below is halved and, really, for me to have handy as we found the original made too many for us. Although we are four, my two girls eat just one or two pancakes. Do follow Ali’s original recipe though if you are more than two adults and two small children with bird-like appetites.

Here they are, Ali’s oatmeal pancakes:

65g oatmeal, the proper pinhead stuff. I have some by a company called Rude Health

125g plain full fat, live yoghurt, I used Greek style as that’s what we always have

112g milk, I used semi skimmed organic as that’s what we get

half a teaspoon of honey, mine is from the beehives of Gabrielle Palmer no less (get ME)

15g plain white flour

15g plain wholemeal flour (I now use 30g wholemeal flour and leave out the white flour completely)

half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda

a big pinch of salt (quarter of a teaspoon kinda thing)

1 egg (note if you have very small eggs use two)

The night before. Mix together the oatmeal, milk, yoghurt and honey. Leave in the fridge overnight. This is the ideal, if you can’t then even just an hour soaking helps.

The next morning, add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.

I use a cast iron griddle. Mine is this one if anyone is interested and it’s brilliant for pancakes. I put a tiny drop of oil and spread it around with a silicon pastry brush (if it were natural bristle they would melt) and then put on three tablespoons of mixture per pancake and on that griddle I can fit three pancakes. When I say tablespoons I mean just the spoons I eat soup and puddings with, not an actual measure.

Turn the pancakes when they look ‘holey’ on top. About two minutes each side. Use your common sense here..I keep my warm in the warming drawer but a low oven would work. Or dish them out, as they’re done, to eager recipients.

They are delicious and everyone in my family loves them and declared them much better than our regular ones. They are nutty, ‘bitey’ and so much more filling than regular pancakes. So good to have that amount of oatmeal (and yoghurt) in pancake form. Of course we won’t talk about the amount of maple syrup I marry them with..

Try these this weekend. Next I must try Emily’s sourdough pancakes.

Eating notes: I have kept this mixture, i.e. the whole mixture with the eggs and flour etc added, overnight when I made too much one greedy Saturday; it keeps really well until the next morning when you can have pancakes all over again.