Because of our travels on Saturday, I moved our pancake morning to today. It really takes a while to do this. Like... an hour. I'll be looking at large griddles because I really do enjoy this!!
Despite receiving a request for a tutorial on how I do my pancake art, I forgot to take pictures until they were already cooking. So instead, I'll give you my pancake recipe plus my pictures from today.
Pancakes
Original recipe from Joy of Cooking. I grew up with this recipe memorized in its tripled form. That's what it took to feed my family and in my memory, I almost always made them. I've tried other pancake recipes and this one is definitely my favorite. I have made a few changes from the recipe and it works for me but I'll make note of what I think is the original recipe amounts. It makes 14 4-inch pancakes. If you're making them regular-like.
Melt in microwavable bowl
2 Tbsp butter. (I use unsalted butter.)(Original recipe is, I think, 3 Tbsp butter. Eliminating butter means you have to grease your pan.)
With a whisk, combine
a pinch of salt,
1 egg,
1 Tbsp sugar, and
1 3/4 tsp baking powder with the melted butter. (Oops! Totally forgot the baking powder this morning. It does make a bit of a difference as Jared mentioned how they tasted this morning.)(Original recipe calls for 3 Tbsp sugar. I've done it without and it tastes fine. I just prefer that little bit of sugar in it.)
Add
1 1/2 cups of flour and
1 1/4 cups milk to the bowl. (To make lump-free pancakes, alternate adding your flour and your milk making sure each addition is whisked smooth before adding the next thing. I usually do roughly 1/3 of the milk, then 1/2 cup flour, 1/3 more milk, etc.)(This morning I used powdered milk. That substitute is 1 1/2 cups water + 4 Tbsp non-instant powdered milk.)
On my electric stove top, I cook them over low heat (#2 on my dial) because my stove gets HOT and I don't like burned pancakes. Haha, I should show you what I think a burned pancake looks like... most people call them NORMAL. I put my oven on WARM (roughly 150 or 200 F) and put the pancakes in there until they're all cooked and we can sit down as a family to eat them.
You can use any pancake recipe but you don't want it really runny or really thick. You definitely don't want chunks.
I don't have black food coloring so I created my own. You know when you have a ton of leftover icing on a plate because it's nasty and you just wanted the cake and then you were lazy and didn't want to get up to throw the plate away so you just sat there playing with it while listening to the conversation around you and you made this really gross grey color? That's what it looked like when I mixed it up.
But it cooked up all pretty and black! And purple always mixes up blue but then turns purple after it sits for a few minutes.
I'm not sure why there's all those spots on the pancakes because I don't remember them from last week. This was just one of my fun must-use-up-all-the-batter pancakes.
I made a few hearts. Kaelyn ate all the small pancakes. She refused the butterflies until we broke them up into small pieces.
I didn't take a picture of it, but I made this circle chain and Kaelyn picked the circles apart one by one to eat them. She still called them cookies at first but then she switched to pancakes.
Yes, I created a scene directly on my table. It was cute though!
