Great Big Pan Cakes.

Yes, I said Pan Cakes, not pancakes.  Capitalised, and two seperate words.  They deserve it.  These are some seriously heavy duty items of foodification.

Recipe is good for two, there are options I’ll lay out as we go through things.

Ingredients

• 2 – 4 Tbsp butter.
• 2 – 4 Tbsp brown sugar.
• 1/2 – 1 tsp cinnamon.
• 3 eggs.
• 1 1/2 cups flour.
• 1 1/2 cups milk.
• 1/2 tsp salt.

Optional
Fruit.  Apples, pears, or peaches.  Just a few slices is plenty.

Method
Pre heat oven to 200c, while it’s heating put 1 – 2 Tbsp butter into bottom of two oven safe pans, a small cast iron frying pan is ideal, but you can probably get away with using a cake or pie tin as well.

Beat the eggs in a mixing bowl, don’t go crazy, once they’re well beaten and just starting to froth is heaps.   Sieve in the flour, pour in the milk, and sprinkle on the flour.  Now beat again, but only until it’s all just mixed, some lumps are fine.  If you over mix it won’t work right.  Don’t waste time doing this, you don’t want to leave the pans in the oven too long, the butter will start to burn off once the oven gets up to temperature.

Take the now hot pans out of the oven, gently swirl the butter around to cover the interior of the pans, including up the side walls a bit (be careful, it’s hot) now sprinkle 1 – 2 Tbsp of the brown sugar, then the cinnamon, into each pan.  Now if you want fruit in your Pan Cake, distribute the slices around the base of the pan.

Now pour on the batter mix, and put the pans into the oven.

After about 25 minutes they should be very puffed up and golden brown.

Remove from the pans to a warmed plate, you’ll find that the body of the pancakes is very light and springy, and quite wonderful.  Serve with butter & maple syrup, or whatever you like on normal pancakes.

If you included fruit (in this photo, about a third of an apple, rougly sliced) maybe you’d rather have cream than maple syrup, but really, do what you like.  I’m not the pancake police.  If I was I might make you have it with custard, but I have no idea how that’d turn out.