Creating Routines, Cooking Pancakes
One of many parenting struggles, and our best pancake recipe.
Since having kids, one of the things I’ve struggled with most is the lack of rhythm in our days. What had once been a structured, busy routine suddenly became an endless, chaotic cycle of pieces of sleep, endless feeding, groggy hours of wakefulness, walks round and round the neighbourhood, more feeding, nappy after nappy after nappy, doctor’s appointments in the middle of the day, FaceTime calls until there was more crying for movement or food or a clean nappy, again and again and again. All parents know the drill. And despite the warnings there really is nothing that can prepare you for it. Even though we are no longer deep in the newborn phase, and life is gradually becoming easier, I still find the lack of predictability, of means to be on my own when I need ten minutes, the scarcity of space in the day, a challenge.
To try to anchor ourselves somewhere, somehow, we started to implement a few weekly routines. The first of these we began when Nora was around eight-months old: Sunday morning pancakes. Nothing crazy. Nothing original. But this simple weekend activity has really grounded us almost every Sunday since we began (almost four years ago, and I can’t think of a Sunday at home where pancakes have been skipped over). Jasper is now fully onboard with the weekly pancake party. And the recipe has been perfected.
I’ve learnt since we've been back in the UK that I need to clarify that these are “American pancakes”. Not crêpes. The one time I served the kids crêpes they screamed until we dropped them off at nursery. These are fluffy, substantial, breakfast pancakes. We all eat them the same way, with puddles of salty butter on each one and lashings of maple syrup sloshed over the top (we might need to fly back to America soon just to buy maple syrup in a more reasonable-sized package). You could obviously add crispy bacon, extra fruit or whipped cream to yours. But we try to keep it simple. Whisking together the batter without the entire kitchen being covered in flour is enough of a test for us. The wholewheat flour was initially a bid to make them slightly healthier/induce less of a sugar crash in the kids. Now we just prefer them that way.
This recipe is loosely adapted from
’s perfect pancakes. I hope you love them as much as we do.
Serves 4
Ingredients
120g wholemeal flour
120g plain flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
30g sugar
2 eggs
390g buttermilk or 200g yogurt, 190g milk
25g melted butter, plus more for the pan, plus more for serving
Blueberries, lots
Maple syrup
Steps
Melt the butter if you haven’t done so already. Do this in the pan you’ll cook the pancakes in. Set aside to cool a little.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, salt, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and sugar.
In a measuring jug or medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, buttermilk and melted butter. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and whisk briefly to combine. Some little lumps are okay. You can now throw in as many blueberries as you or your children want (in our case, the whole punnet), or you can wait to add them to the pancakes as they cook for a more “fair” distribution.
Heat the frying pan (we normally do this in our very American and much-loved cast iron skillet) with a teaspoonful of butter in until the butter has melted and starts sizzling, swirling the pan to make sure there’s butter everywhere. Ladle a serving spoon-full or a few tablespoons-full of batter into the pan, leaving enough space for each pancake to be flipped without too much stress. Add a few blueberries to each one if you haven’t already mixed them into the batter. When they’re starting to look a little firmer and there’s some bubbles on top, flip them over and keep cooking until fluffy and set (if you want to check they’re done, poke a knife in to make sure the batter isn’t still raw inside).
Pile them high and serve with plenty of salted butter and lashings (or drizzles if it’s for the kids) of maple syrup, and a hot coffee.