Flipping Yummy!

Good ol’Shrove Tuesday*. Every year, I used to have to phone my mum on this Tuesday night, get her to tell me how to make pancakes, and then somehow I’d manage to cock them up, but still end up with something edible. There was the year in halls where I didn’t even have a mixing bowl, so ended up mixing it up in a saucepan, the time I ended up accidentally deep frying my pancakes until they were crispy (I remember them as being surprisingly good, but that might be just my terrible memory) and the time when I even managed to make a packet mix taste awful. (When I mess up a recipe, I mess it up gooood – the perfect example being when I made fruit salad for my GCSE cooking class taste burnt! Still slightly proud of that actually)

The past few years, I’ve used packet mixes, or my old housemate would make the pancakes, but this year I thought I’d have a go at actually making them myself, and of course I took some photos. I used Delia Smiths recipe from Waitrose’s website because it seemed to be the most similar to the one I remember my mum making.

So! A photo heavy version of the recipe follows. You’ll need:

• 110g plain flour
• Pinch of salt
• 2 large or medium eggs
• 200ml milk mixed with 75ml water
• 50g butter

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl. Make a well in the middle and break the eggs into it.

Whisk the eggs up, incorporating flour around the edges (first photo, I didn’t read the recipe properly and just got whisk happy.) Gradually add in small quantities of the milk and water mixture (slosh it in), still whisking. Whisk until the batter is smooth, with the consistency of thin cream.

Melt the butter (and think, thats a lot of butter just to grease a pan. It really isn’t. Or my pancakes are just especially unhealthy) Spoon 2 tablespoons of it into the batter and whisk it in, then pour the rest into a bowl to lubricate the pan as needed.

Delia (first name terms, we’re totes bff’s) suggests a 50ml ladle is perfect for the amount of batter you need. I don’t have a ladle with measurements, but I do have bar spirit measures. (Thanks Dad, I nicked these out of one of the pubs you had 3 years ago, along with a few of the Stella Artois chalices and some pourers. Having parents who own a pub is bloody handy sometimes.) I used this to do my first pancake with the same sized pan she suggests in the recipe.

50ml is not enough batter. Silly Delia. However her suggestion of a palette knife to flip the pancake was brilliant, and was bendy enough to lift the pancake at the edges.

I did of course have a go at flipping the pancake. It worked out quite well, I didn’t drop any…

…but trying to take a photo of a pancake in the air with a remote in one hand and the frying pan in the other is unsurprisingly difficult!

I eventually used up all of my batter, and popped the last pancake on my plate.

Sprinkled sugar on top…

Squirted some lemon juice on top (it has to be Jif lemon, its just wrong to have any other lemon juice!)

Folded the pancake into a quarter…

And finally took a bite out of it quickly, dribbling lemon juice down my chin. Yummy!

Why do we only seem to have pancakes once a year? They’re so quick, cheap and easy to make!

* Anyone else a bit annoyed the supermarkets call it “Pancake Day” in their advertising?