February 12th - Pancake Day!

I probably won't be making pancakes today - if I do, they will be scotch pancakes which slightly defeats the purpose of using up eggs, but I prefer them to the traditional pancakes. We will probably have them at the weekend (The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath).

Take 8oz SR flour and rub in 2 oz butter (4oz and 1oz for just one or two people)

(if you are reading this, BoggyB, or Papa, "rubbing in" means dropping the lump of butter into the flour so it gets coated all over, picking it up and gently squishing it a little to expose some of the butter, dropping it in, again to coat the revealed surfaces, picking it up and squishing a bit more and dropping it in again, over and over with light, gentle movements, until the butter lump gets thinner and thinner and finally disintegrates into a million tiny grains all covered in flour. This sounds a longer and more tedious process than it actually is. You have finished when the bowl looks as though it is full of fine bread crumbs)

Add a tablespoon (desertspoon) of sugar - any old sugar - white, brown, caster, granulated - and mix it in well. 

Put a non-stick pan on to get hot. Rub a smear - just a smidgeon - of butter round the pan with a bit of kitchen paper to grease it slightly

Stir about half a pint of milk (quarter of a pint, that's 5 fluid oz) to the flour/butter/sugar mixture, so that it becomes the consistency of double cream.

Check that the pan is hot; if you flick a drop of water onto the surface it should sizzle and spit a little.

Now, use a tablespoon to put a dollop of pancake mix into the pan. Watch it (DON'T GO AWAY!), and when little bubbles appear in the top surface (a couple of minutes), flip it over with a spatula or fish slice. The underneath should be a nice golden brown with no runny bits. Let it cook for another minute or so, and transfer to a cooling rack (aka the grill pan).

Now that you've got the hang of it, you can cook several in one go. I can get three in my big pan at the same time; four usually causes problems when it comes to flipping them over.

We eat them with maple syrup and ice cream as a pudding, or with cheese or jam or honey (wenslydale cheese AND honey is good too) instead of bread.

Best Beloved went through a phase of having them for breakfast - I used to make up the flour/butter/sugar mix in bulk, and keep it in the fridge. Then, every morning, I just used enough to make his pancakes. (there's a declaration of true love in that statement; this phase lasted at least a year!)