Pancake Day 2012 - eleven pancakes in one day!

Have you all celebrated? I think I've actually ended up eating more pancakes than I did last year!

Unlike my Mum, I wasn't organised enough to make pancakes before the school run. The children were happy with shop-bought Scotch pancakes with golden syrup (for Izzy only - too messy for Toby!!) and strawberries:

Once I got back home, I ate two batches of raspberry, lime and coconut pancakes... batch #1 may have been a bit of a fail presentation wise, but it was still tasty:

Batch #2 was even better! My tummy insisted that I waited a little while between batches, so these ended up being breakfast and lunch!

Dinner was more pancakes - butternut squash and goats cheese pancakes with asparagus and salad...

I doubled the recipe thinking that there wouldn't have been enough otherwise. Big mistake. These were delicious but so dense - almost as if they were made of potato. Toby had one, Izzy had two, I had three and Liam had four...and we could have probably all done with having had one pancake less! There's still some mix leftover too!!

I loved these, but then with goats cheese and butternut squash in the title, I kind of knew I would. The great thing was that Liam loved them too! When I first told him we were having butternut squash for dinner...in pancakes...he wasn't too impressed. I think his response was "no, I don't think I'll like that, pancakes should only be sweet!" He really enjoyed them though, phew!

We had to leave a little room for dessert - no Pancake Day would be complete without a couple of pancakes with lemon juice and sugar...

Eleven pancakes. Done and most definitely done.

What is your favourite type of pancake? We all like different types in this house - my favourite are small American-style fruity ones like this morning's, Liam loves the large (fill a whole pan when he makes them!) American pancake with chocolate chips, and Izzy prefers crepes with lemon juice and sugar. We all like all of them really though! I'd never actually made American pancakes before I started reading blogs. It's weird how some things so quickly become "normal". I'm glad to have the extra variety in my pancake life now!! ;-)

When I was younger, my Mum would make pancakes before school for my sisters and I, and then again in the evening when my Dad was home. My record for number of pancakes eaten before school was (I think) eight...which my littlest sister Olivia equalled this morning! I don't remember having pancakes very often the rest of the year though, whereas we probably have pancakes as a weekend breakfast 1-2 times a month. Pancake Day will  still always be worth the extra celebrating...love them! :-D

"It Tastes Great, But..."

...seems to have been my motto today! I made two great recipes, both of which tasted fantastic, but did not look how I was expecting/wanted them to!! Before I continue, I just wanted to state the obvious - the appearance of these recipes is quite clearly my fault, this post is in no way meant as criticism of either of the ladies who wrote the recipes - both are great writers, and fantastic cooks!

My troubles in the kitchen started with breakfast - when I woke up, I read a few blogs on my phone and came across Clean Eating Chelsey's post about Blueberry Pancakes. These looked fantastic - I had to make them straight away!! The batter was really quick to make, but, being an American recipe, it did use cups. I'm not too good with cups. (I do know they shouldn't be difficult but weighing ingredients seems so much more exact!) I think I didn't put in enough oats and flour, so the pancake batter was a bit liquidy. Coupled with my impatience to eat, and therefore not waiting for the oil to fully heat up, what should have been 3 neat pancakes turned into this in my pan...

Ooops...

These pancakes did still taste amazing. I topped them with a few more fresh blueberries, some (too thin - I couldn't even get that right this morning!) peanut flour sauce (peanut flour + maple syrup + milk) and some extra maple syrup for good measure!

As Chelsey promised, these were super filling! A great Sunday breakfast, despite appearances!!

My other kitchen "fail" today was an attempt to make Averie's 3 Minute Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge. I don't actually know what went wrong with this as I followed the recipe exactly (except doubling it so that I used the whole tin of condensed milk, but that shouldn't have made a difference). Whilst Averie's finished recipe looks like proper fudge, mine...did not...

No amount of time in the freezer made this solid enough to cut neatly! They, again, tasted amazing though, which I suppose is the main thing. Izzy definitely approved of the scrapings from the pan!

And we all had some after dinner and loved it. Even Liam, who hates peanut butter mixed into things, fell for me saying it was "just chocolate fudge" and thought it was delicious! (shhh: don't tell him - there's still some left in the freezer I want him to help me eat!!)

This tasted a lot like cold Betty Crocker's chocolate fudge icing - when I was at uni I used to buy tubs of that stuff and keep it in the fridge just to eat spoonfuls of it, and this reminded me a lot of that!!

So I suppose the lesson of today was...so long as things taste good, it doesn't matter too much what they look like. Well as long as I'm just serving them to my family that is! It would be nicer if I could make things look a bit prettier though!!

I have enjoyed some slightly more presentable meals today as well. For lunch I baked some potatoes, scooped out some of the flesh (to use tomorrow) and re-baked the skins.

Served with homemade houmous - this fitted Liam's request for a "simple and not too heavy" meal, without being the boring plain toast that he'd suggested!!

This was just my first round - I think I had 8 potato skins in total, yum!

Liam cooked dinner tonight - a stirfry with peppers, peas, onion, garlic, basil smoked tofu and noodles. I topped mine with some leftover houmous...

I love stirfry with noodles, so flavoursome and filling. The children love the noodles too so we should really have them more often!

Have you had any recipe "fails" recently? Do you make an effort to present your food nicely, or are you more concerned with taste? I definitely think taste is the most important thing when it comes to cooking, but I do try to make an effort with presentation too - eating horrible looking things can be a bit off-putting sometimes. Luckily neither of today's recipes "fails" looked that bad, and they were both so delicious that they made up for any appearance failings anyway!