So today is an important and glorious day – Shrove Tuesday, known as Pancake Day for many of us.
As a HUGE pancake fan and lover of cooking and food, I made plans to make myself a fabulous lunch (consisting of pancakes obviously).I hadn’t made them for about two years until today. However, my forgetful nature and lack of common sense kicked in when I realised I finished the last of the eggs on Sunday (boiled egg and toast soldiers seemed like a good idea at the time). I spent ages searching the net for a nice recipe for egg-free pancakes without any luck. So forever an optimist, I just went and improvised. I rarely go with set measurements so please don’t blame me if you try it and it goes wrong!
My ingredients to make 6 pancakes which you can adjust accordingly were:
- Plain white flour- approximately 4 tablespoons
- Milk- once again not sure how much but add it when necessary to get the right consistency of your choice
- Sugar- any type (even icing sugar) will do, about two teaspoons but add more if you want
- Butter- a small teaspoon per pancake
- Nutella- as much as you prefer. If you don’t like it, replace it with sugar/ lemon/ syrup as a topping!
To make the pancakes, mix the flour with a whisk (or tablespoon) in a mixing bowl with enough milk to resemble a thick paste. Gradually add more milk until it’s more liquefied but still sticks to the whisk/tablespoon and most lumps of flour are gone. Add the two (or more) teaspoons of sugar and whisk again. These make a more American style pancake so add a lot more milk if you prefer the crêpe style pancake.
On a medium-low heat, put a small teaspoon of butter into a non-stick frying pan until melted. Put a tablespoon of the pancake batter into the melted butter and shake it off. After about a minute it should have cooked on one side, flip and cook on the other side. You can try tossing in the air however I would not recommend that! If it hasn’t browned yet, flip it back and cook until it has. Once both sides are cooked, put it on the plate and repeat the process for the other pancakes.
At the end once all pancakes are cooked, put a little butter back in the frying pan and put all the pancakes back in for a last minute heating and to prevent them from drying. Then serve in piles of three/ four and top with whatever you fancy. Which in my case was a large amount of Nutella.
Or of course you could follow this recipe using an egg, in which case you can reduce the amount of milk you use. Happy flipping!
