Giveaway Winner and Pancakes

Hello! Did you all enjoy some pancakes yesterday? I had them twice! First we had traditional crepes with lemon and sugar for breakfast…

Next time I need to make a double batch as both children loved these so much that I only ended up getting one pancake for myself! I made up for it this morning though by making pancakes for the 2nd day running…once Izzy had gone to school so there were more pancakes for me!!

Tuesdays are always a bit of a funny day meal time wise – the children go to Liam’s at 4.30pm and eat dinner/stay the night there, and I have spinning at 7pm. Normally I’d eat when I get home but I had a gym review booked for 8.30pm and wasn’t sure how long it would take - so at 5pm I ate an early dinner of more pancakes. This time inspired by Maria’s chocolate peanut pancakes with caramelised banana…although I managed to slightly burn mine, whoops, they tasted nicer than they looked!!

Topped with caramelised banana and Justin’s chocolate hazelnut butter, delicious!

And now to announce the popchips giveaway winner…

(there were 14 comments but the first two were the same entry)

Congratulations Laura @ A Daisy Chain Dream!

If you could email me your address at porridgeandparsnips@live.co.uk then I’ll make sure your popchips are on their way to you asap!

Thanks to everyone that took the time to enter!

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

Raspberry, Lime & Coconut Pancakes {recipe}

Happy Shrove Tuesday! Do you remember last year when I ate pancakes for every meal? I wasn't planning to eat that many again this year, but I've eaten 2 batches of these pancakes so far as the first batch was too thin/spread all over the pan into a, still tasty, mess. Just for you (!), I changed the recipe and made them again...and I'm so glad I did as the 2nd batch was perfect! More pancakes this evening, which I'll come back and tell you about later, but for now - go make these!

Raspberry, Lime and Coconut Pancakes
(serves 1 - makes 3 pancakes)

• 75g self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 20g desiccated coconut
• 15g sugar
• 1 egg
• 15g oil (or melted butter)
• juice of half a lime
• 30-35ml milk
• 12 raspberries

1. Place a small amount of oil in a frying pan and place on a low-medium heat.
2. First combine all the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, coconut and sugar) in a bowl.
3. Add the egg, oil and lime juice and mix.
4. Add the milk slowly - you want enough milk to "wet" all your flour etc, but you want the batter to still be quite thick.
5. Place the batter into the pan in three sections. Put 4 raspberries on top of each pancake and press down gently.
6. Cook the pancakes until they start bubbling. This will take a few minutes - be patient! Cooking the pancakes slowly gives a nice fluffy inside without a burnt outside.
7. When the pancakes start bubbling, gently flip them over and cook on the other side for another minute or two until golden brown.
8. Serve with more raspberries and coconut, and syrup if you'd like. Enjoy!

I'm not having much luck with my pancakes so far today. As I said above, the first batch I made spread all over the pan - the batter was way too runny so I ended up with 1 giant pancake mess! I adjusted the ratios for the second batch and these were perfect, but only 2 of them successfully survived the flip. Oh well, they tasted amazing. I'm not overly happy with any of the photos I took but they'll have to do - I'm way too full to consider eating any more pancakes until Izzy gets home!!

I suppose the third pancake wasn't too ugly - looking at these photos, they all seem to be rather misshapen anyway! Haha, taste over appearance, right?!! ;-)

These tasted perfect - all fluffy on the inside and crispy on the outside. They reminded me more of biscuits than breakfast! The tang of the raspberries and lime juice cuts through the sweetness though - delicious. They were loosely based on my strawberry and coconut pancakes but I didn't want oats in these so I changed the recipe around a bit. That's where I went wrong with the first batch really - oats seemingly absorb a lot more liquid than flour so I had to increase the flour and decrease the liquid in second batch. These are great now though, and you could change up the flavours with different fruits etc. My go-to pancake recipe when I'm only cooking for myself now I think! :-)

Have you had any pancakes yet today? Or are you planning to? I've already had texts from a couple of family members this morning - my littlest sister ate 8 crepes before going to school and my Dad had American pancakes with bacon and maple syrup in a cafe. I didn't have time to make the children pancakes before school (I don't know how my Mum does it!) so I just gave them shop-bought Scotch pancakes and will make "proper" ones later. Izzy's having pancakes for pudding with her school lunch today too...we'll all be pancaked-out by the end of today...just how it should be!! ;-)

Pancake Round-Up

My laptop charger arrived today! :) I don't think it's completely solved the problem unfortunately, but for now at least, it has provided me with computer access so I'm happy! :)

I hope you've all having a great pancake day?

Lots of pancakes have been eaten here...

It started with regular pancakes before the others went to school/uni - 200g plain flour, 2 eggs, 2 tbsp oil and 600 ml milk to make these beauties...

I had 2 rolled up with lemon juice and sugar...

Yum. Although a lot smaller than usual - the "non-stick" pan we normally use for pancakes decided it had enough this morning so we had to use the mini pan instead, they were quite cute, although it did cause much frustration for Liam (the pancake maker) as we were eating them twice as fast, whereas it was still taking him just as long to make them!!

I can't remember if I've told you about the water problems we've been having in the house recently? On Sunday they were doing roadworks and managed to burst the water pipe outside our house...so no running water on Sunday night. Then on Monday we came down to find water dripping from the ceiling in the entrance hallway, right by the light! So our landlord's brother came round last night to have a look and stop the immediate leak, then was back again this morning to finish fixing it. By the time he left at 10.30am I was starving again - 2 mini pancakes is not enough for breakfast!! So I used some of the remaining pancake batter to make a banana fritter/thick banana pancake... It went from this rather unappealing mess in a pan...

to this after half frying, half grilling (I didn't trust myself to flip it!)...

to this...

It tasted amazing, especially with the maple syrup. These photos don't really do it justice!

So good. And it's got fruit in it so it's kind of healthy right?! Who cares? It's pancake day...any excuse! :)

For lunch, I wanted to stick with the pancake theme, so decided to have a 2nd attempt at socca. Those of you who remember the disaster that was me trying to pan-fry socca, will not be surprised that I decided to oven bake it this time! I just mixed 55g chickpea flour, 110ml water and 10ml sesame oil (as I was going to be serving it with houmous) and put it into a cake tin...

and baked it in the oven at about 180C (I already had peppers roasting in the oven so just put it in with them) for about 15 minutes...

not bad...you'll have to wait a minute to see whether it came out of the pan ok!

Luckily for me, baby decided to have a super-long nap today 10.30am-1.30pm, so I had plenty of time in the kitchen to make the banana pancake (above) and lunch. As well as the socca, I roasted some peppers and made houmous. I decided on caramelised red onion houmous as it's my favourite shop bought flavour. I sliced and fried 2 small red onions, then blitzed them up with a tin of rinsed chickpeas, 1.5tsp sesame oil, 40g tahini, 2 garlic cloves and 5ml lemon juice..
.

plus water until the houmous reached desired consistency...

this is good, nice sesame flavour, but the onion tasted raw...I'll have to cook it for longer first next time...

So, time to plate up lunch. Not surprisingly, the socca didn't manage to come out in one piece (I'd forgotten to grease the pan which wouldn't have helped!!)

but once it was topped with houmous and roast peppers you couldn't really tell...



although admittedly it didn't really look much like a pancake then either! Ah well, it tasted good...socca didn't really have a strong taste but had a nice texture...any taste would have been overpowered by the "raw" onion flavour anyway!!

This afternoon, I snacked on non-pancake food...namely 4 chocolate biscuits (oops!) and a maple walnut latte...but non-pancake photos aren't going into my post today or it'll go on forever! Having not had access to my laptop recently, I've kind of got out of the habit of photographing every little thing I eat...I might stick to just posting photos of my main meals in future, unless I eat/make any interesting snacks of course! :)

For dinner, another version of pancakes... goat's cheese and leek crepes...which were based on a recipe in The Vegetarian Cookbook...

and were meant to look like this...

I simplified the recipe down a bit, cutting out salt pepper etc as I don't like using salt in cooking and we didn't have the other things. So I ended up just gently frying leeks in butter and oil...

Before assembling the pancakes. The recipe just calls for "savoury pancakes" and, in my experience, shop bought pancakes tend to work better for savoury bake recipes. However Waitrose were out of stock of their fresh crepes, so Liam bought dry good pancakes from Tesco. Bleugh...much smaller, thicker, and way too sweet despite saying they were suitable for sweet or savoury! Had to make do though, especially as our pan was in no way up to making more pancakes!

First I added the leeks...

then goat's cheese on top...

before rolling them and putting in baking dish...

Whenever I've made savoury pancakes in the past, I've put a white sauce on top of them before baking. However this recipe didn't suggest that so I just went with it as I was tired and wanted a quick dinner!

After about 5 minutes in the oven...

it was time to serve up...

typically I served mine last and it split everywhere. Daughter's looked slightly more attractive...

...or maybe not...they tasted better than they looked!! Everyone else really enjoyed these (baby scoffed the pancake super fast but wasn't keen on the leeks!) but I couldn't get past the sweetness of the pancakes. I ate a bit of the filling when I was prepping them though and that was yummy...I'm in a loving goat's cheese phase at the moment! :)

After dinner, Liam and daughter had yet more Tesco pancakes, this time with Nutella, banana and whipped cream...

but I contented myself with a few fingers of Nutella, then waited until the children were in bed before using the last of the pancake batter from this morning up.

My final pancake of the day... a blueberry and vanilla version of this morning's banana pancake... not quite the American style pancakes I'd planned to make (I ran out of time/sacrificed them for the banana pancake earlier!) but delicious nonetheless...served with Rachel's Greek style coconut yoghurt...

Yum. So many pancakes! I think my favourite was the banana pancake, but they've all been prettyy good! :)

Have you managed to enjoy some pancakes today? And are you giving anything up for Lent?

I made a last minute decision today to give up shop-bought processed sweet treats (...and breathe!) so, importantly!, I'm still allowed raw chocolate (some on its way to me in the post at the moment!) but not bought chocolate, bought cakes, bought biscuits etc...and if I make my own sweet treats I will try to replace the white sugar with a more natural alternative. A bit of a wordy one, but hopefully means its not too restrictive (I don't see anything wrong with having a sweet treat now and again, even in Lent) but will make me think about what I'm giving up, and also focus me back to healthy eating again...I think I need it after today's load of white flour pancakes!! Delicious, but so full and bloated now!

Pancake Day!

Happy Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Day!! :) I've been looking forward to today for ages - a day where we focus on food even more than usual sounds good to me!!

Liam's about to go off to uni with his laptop (please charger, arrive soon & solve my laptop problems!!) so I will just leave you with my first pancake of the day...

Basic recipe (200g flour, 2 eggs, 600ml milk) with lemon juice and sugar... gotta keep it simple first thing... many more pancakes and many more varieties planned for the rest of the day!!

Have a great day everyone! Hopefully "see" you later - I've begged Liam to let me use his laptop for a decent amount of time tonight to write about all my pancakes - will hopefully persuade the Mac to co-operate too so I can get more photos in the post...that's if all my planned pancakes turn out well anyway! :)