Sunday Morning Pancakes
What can be better to wake up to on a Sunday than pancakes? Three delicious types of pancakes! So I thought I’d share the recipe for these cherry bakewell, apple and cinnamon and lime and coconut drop pancakes. They’re quick, delicious and not as terrible for you as you may think (well – it’s no green smoothie let’s put it that way, but there is some nutritional value in them!)
Ingredients (makes enough for 2 – 3 people):
For the pancake batter
- 110g plain flour
- 2 tsp baking-powder
- 1 tbsp golden caster sugar
- 1 medium egg
- 150ml milk
- 15g butter, melted, plus extra for frying
- 1 tsp vanilla essence
For the toppings
- 3 tbsp Desiccated coconut
- 1/2 lime (in wedges)
- a sprinkle of icing sugar
- 2-3 sweet apples or 1 cooking apple
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 2 tbsp ground almonds
- cherry compote or jam
- clotted cream/dulce de leche (if you’re feeling decadent)
Pancake Batter:
Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder and a pinch of salt into a bowl and make a well in the centre (this was always my favourite bit as a child – I used to LOVE making the well when we were baking – weird kid!). Put the egg and about 50ml of the milk into a separate bowl, mix, and then pour it into the well and stir the dry ingredients into the liquid gradually with a whisk. When the mixture is smooth, gradually add the rest of the milk, stirring until you have a smooth batter. Add the vanilla essence and then stir in the melted butter to your batter (though many don’t do this part and I actually left it out of my pancakes, but more because I forgot than because I meant to skip it!)
Apple, Cinnamon and Caramel:
Peel and dice up your apple/s and place them in a small pan with a little bit of water. If you’re using a cooking apple, you may want a tiny sprinkle of sugar too but the dulce de leche should make this sweet enough! Add the cinnamon to taste and simmer the apples down til they are soft. Maybe cool the apple off a bit before you ladle it onto your pancakes as it will almost certainly burn your tongue, and the caramel will slide off. You can either stir in the caramel into the apple or plonk a nice big spoon of it on top when you’ve laid out your pancakes.
Cherry Bakewell:
This one involved replacing 2 tbsp of flour with ground almonds in the pancake batter. In hindsight you may also want to add a dash of almond essence as they weren’t almondy enough for me, but it’s up to you. The cherries on top I admit were a cheat – I used some posh Morello cherry conserve jam I bought a while ago which is delicious, and Adam loves clotted cream and we had some in the fridge so he couldn’t resist! You could however simmer up some fresh cherries to make a compote if you’re feeling snazzy.
Lime and Coconut:
Similar to the Cherry Bakewell flavour, substitute in 2 tbsp flour but this time for 3 tbsp coconut. It make them look a little lumpy in batter form but once they were cooked they worked a treat! You could alo add lime to the batter but I was worried about curdling so I just squeezed it on top and added a little icing sugar to make it pretty and to counter the sharpness of the lime.
Cooking Instructions:
Melt a knob of butter in a frying-pan over a medium heat – the butter should just coat the bottom of the pan – do not let it get too hot as butter gets burnt much faster than other cooking fats. If you’re going to make pancakes, you might as well use butter – non of this gross spray pretend healthy butter, or olive oil – nobody want’s eau de olive in their pancakes! Using a small ladle, add the batter to the pan, creating pancakes about 7cm in size. Cook for two to three minutes, until the pancakes are golden underneath and bubbles are starting to appear on the surface (the surface will also look ‘drier’). Using a palette-knife, carefully turn each pancake over and cook on the other side until brown*. Serve immediately, though I don’t know how you could resist not to!
*Now brown means golden brown, not so much heading-towards-burnt brown. You may notice that some of mine caught ever so slightly. I’m not a perfect cook, and I got distracted by the inevitable lure of Spotify.
There you go, hey presto – 3 different types of scotch pancakes, and it wasn’t too much effort to make them! A perfect Sunday brunch for a lazy weekend treat – plus you can just follow the batter recipe and mix up the toppings however you like!
Let me know what if you try it and which you think works best?
