Extra-thick Pancakes for Breakfast

Just a quick post today. I've spent some time this morning experimenting with making extra-thick pancakes.  Here's the recipe I invented for this purpose:

Ingredients:
1 cup flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
0.5 tsp coarse sea salt

3 Tbsp golden syrup
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup melted unsalted butter
1-2 tsp vanilla extract (I like vanilla)

Instructions:
Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl and stir until well mixed.
Combine the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl and stir until well mixed.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix until just combined, clumps are okay and preferred.  If there are no clumps, you have over-mixed; good luck with your chewy pancakes, loser.  Seriously though, it's not a big deal, just don't stir too much.

Pour the batter onto a pre-heated pan in whatever size you would like.  I used my 12-in cast-iron frying pan, it's pretty well-used, so I didn't need to butter it or anything.  Keep the heat around medium-low, lower than you would usually use for pancakes, since you want to cook these through without burning the bottom.

I also tried to pipe the batter into the pan by filling a plastic bag with the batter and cutting off a corner.  I cut too much corner off, so I wasn't really happy with this method, but maybe I'll try it again sometime to see if I can do better.

Basically, I made the pancakes this thick by adding extra baking powder and using less milk.  I'd say it turned out pretty well.  Even without any toppings, these are delicious.  Once again, I'll stress the magic of course sea salt: In cookies, cupcakes, or even pancakes, that tiny fleck of salt in every other bite makes a good food into an amazing food.

Top these babies with some salted butter (the salted kind is imperative, unsalted butter just won't do here) and some maple syrup, and you've got yourself one delicious breakfast.

Now, feast your eyes on this:

That's almost the entire batch, so if you want to feed more than just yourself, I'd suggest doubling or tripling the recipe.

Quick Cupcake Post

Today, I made cupcakes!

I've decided I'm not going to say much more than this:  If you click on the cupcake link, you see that they're Cherry Coke Cupcakes, and if you scroll all the way into the comments, you'll find a recipe for buttercream frosting.

I thought that Cherry Coke flavored cupcakes was a pretty good idea.  It probably is, but these cupcakes, while still tasty, don't really taste anything like Cherry Coke.

There is one thing I really liked about the recipe, and I'm just going to quote the recipe here:

In a saucepan, boil the Coca-Cola, and cherry syrup gently for five minutes. Melt in the butter and cocoa powder.

Do that, just that, and drink it.  That shit tastes fantastic.  I'm definitely going to use that as the basis of a hot chocolate some day.

I guess the next recipe I make will be the crazy aubergine custards from the recipe book, and after that, maybe some Chicken, Bacon, and Ranch French Bread Pizza.

Saturday Evening Skewers

Hello again.

I've finally gotten some more cooking done.  Well, sort of, this wasn't much of a feat.  You see, I finally got around to making recipe number 14, Mozzarella and Tomato Skewers, from the "400 Appetizers & Party Recipes" book.  It's a pretty simple recipe, and only calls for about 4 ingredients, bread, tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil.  What's had me putting it off for so long was my lack of skewers.  You see, they don't sell them at my local Sainsbury's.  Of course, now that I've gotten some from Sea Woo, the Asian supermarket, a new store has opened up right next to Sainsbury's that does carry skewers; just my luck. 

Well, I went out this morning and spent entirely too much on groceries, which I've been doing far too often, I'm afraid, and among those groceries were the requisite ingredients.  First, you cut the crusts off the bread, cut into quarters, cover with olive oil, and bake.

Look at all those slices of bread!  It takes three breads for each skewer, and here I have forty two pieces, which will eventually make fourteen skewers.  Since each skewer also gets two pieces of mozzarella and two slices of tomato, I'll need twenty eight of each.

Once the bread is baked, you just stack them up: bread, cheese, tomato, basil, bread, cheese, tomato, basil, bread, and put a skewer through them.  I took fresh basil leaves off my basil plant.  I thought the poor thing would be stripped bare by this recipe, but it turns out these plants are dense with leaves.  I hardly made a mark. 

If you're making these, I suggest you stop at this point.  This is basically a stacked Caprese salad, and it's delicious.  However, the recipe says to drizzle it all with olive oil, add some salt and pepper, and put it all back in the oven until the cheese starts to melt.

Fresh out of the oven, they've all shrunk a little bit, so you've got to push them down so they stay together, and be sure to let them cool before you try one, unless you want a mouth full of lava-hot molten tomato juice.  Once they've been baked, the top piece of bread becomes scratch-the-top-of-your-mouth crispy, and the other two pieces are soggy.  That's not to say that they're not still delicious.  I've already finished about ten of these things for my dinner.

After all that, I was left with the problem of what to do with all the crusts I had cut off the bread.  I've heard that people around here like to eat their bread pudding, so I thought I'd give it a try.  I read some recipes online and from "The Joy of Cooking", but none of those were really what I was looking for, so I made my own recipe.

Ingredients:

Crusts and Heels from 1 small bag of white bread, chopped into sticks
3 eggs
~3/4 cup double cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp mixed spices
1/4 cup white wine (I'm trying to get rid of the stuff)
~3 tbsp butter
handful of pine nuts
~3 tbsp golden syrup

I basically just raided my cupboard for some things I could use to make it.  You put the pine nuts in with the bread and chop the butter up to place on top.  Then, mix together the remaining ingredients and pour them over the bread.  Let it sit for a while and press the bread down so that it soaks everything up.  I put it in a 350℉ oven for about 30 minutes.  In the end, it was a little dry, but not bad.  It tastes a lot like French bread, but it's in the shape of a pie.  I kind of like it.

If I've ever got a bunch of bread sitting around, I might make this again.

All right, next on the list are, Cherry Coke Cupcakes, from the internet and, Roasted Garlic and Aubergine Custards with Red Pepper Dressing, from the book.  Maybe I'll get to that someday.