Sunday 3rd June - Let's eat cake

well, drop scones, actually, as we have run out of bread.

You will need

half a pound of flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, 2 ounces of butter all dumped into a big mixing bowl. Also a heavy, preferably non-stick frying pan, fish slice, and Internet-enabled mobile phone. Oh, and a grill pan with trivet for them to cool on.

It's a good job my scales are bilingual; the first part of my education was all wrestling with different number bases;
pounds shillings and pence (20 shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling)
stones, pounds and ounces (14 pounds to the stone, 16 ounces to the pound)
gallons, pints and ounces (20 ounces to the pint, 2 pints to the quart, 4 quarts - at least that makes sense - to the gallon). The abbreviations didn't make much sense either; oz for ounce (fluid or weight), L for pound and d for penny (money), lb for pound (weight). Somewhere in that lot are rods, poles, perches, furlongs, miles, feet, yards, inches...  Today's children have it easy with all their kilogrammes and kilometres and everything in tens.

Anyway, "rub in" (that's techno speak for coat your fingers and the butter in the flour, squishing the butter slightly to increase its surface area, which you coat with flour and squish again, over and over, raising it out of the flour for the "squish" bit and dropping it back in for the "coat" bit, until the butter has become zillions of tiny bits of butter all coated in flour, and the bowl looks as if it is full of fine bread crumbs) and stir in enough milk to make something the thickness of custard. About a mugful. Probably in the region of 200ml, whatever that is in pints and ounces.

Now, let that rest while you heat the pan on a medium hot setting, and wipe a smear of butter over the surface. Switch on the mobile phone and find either http://johnthelutheran.tumblr.com/ or http://revdkathy.tumblr.com/, as these sites will help you to stay focused on the cooking of the scones, without getting distracted by reading a book or watching television.

sorry, no picture of the scones as we have eaten them all.

Using a tablespoon, make three separate puddles of scone liquid in the pan, and cook until you see bubbles forming in the surface and the edges seem to have become slightly firm. (about three or four pages on the tumblr site). Flip them over with the fish slice; the cooked surface should be golden brown. Leave them for about another three pages, and then transfer them to the grill pan to cool. Continue in this way until all the mixture is used up. 

This will make about 20 pancakes - good with cheese, or jam, or ice cream and maple syrup, or just butter. I used to make double quantity of flour/sugar/butter mix, and just use as much as I wanted, leaving the rest in the fridge. I don't know how long it will keep for in the crumb state - I had always used it up by the end of the week.