Shrove Tuesday

Everyone knows how to make normal pancakes - or crepes, as I guess they are technically known. It's about 200g flour, an egg and enough milk to make it into a batter. Heat pan, pour in, flip, flip, onto a plate, lemon, sugar. Fine lovely and wonderful.

But I think Shrove Tuesday, which is this coming Tuesday 16th February, is THE time to branch out and make naughty pancakes, or American pancakes. I know I'm doing a lot of American stuff here, but I do have a real thing for their kind of food.

Anyway, this recipe can be found on p.93 of Nigella Lawson's excellent Nigella Express. I halve the quantities, but her recipe in full goes like this:

600g flour
3 x 15ml tablespoons baking powder
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp salt
4og sugar (I tend to leave this out)
1 egg
250ml milk

Shake or stir the dry ingredients together. You can leave this mixture in a jar until you're ready to use it.

For each 150g of flour mixture, crack an egg into it and half mix it with the flour, then add the milk (or if you want to be really authentic, buttermilk) and whisk to combine to a thick batter. Then cook in blobs, as large or small as you'd like and serve with butter and maple syrup and, if you're really not worried about your heart, crispy bacon.

From these you get those fluffy, light, yet creamy pancakes that always hit me right in the temporal lobes. I usually have to be restrained from leaping to my feet, still chewing and, saluting an invisble flag with my fork, launching into Amazing Grace.




NB. Thanks and huge apologies to Isola Bay (see below) who pointed out that my first posting on this was very misleading. And when I say misleading, I mean completely and utterly wrong. I guess it just goes to show that you can only be SO creative and slapdash when it comes to cooking and get away with it.