Liquid Gold for Breakfast

And once again I find myself in a apologizing position being so tremendously late to write this last post on Canada. How many people have wished that days were made of 24 hours? Or we would be able to fill up even those?

If you do forgive me, many thanks! I hope you are not going to give up on me and keep reading. I promise ("parole, parole, parole") to start my three posts on Japan followed by Paris, Tuscany, and Jordan.

I am sure everyone has an infallible recipe to make pancakes and has found the best filling ever. There is indeed a fair amount of debate around how pancakes should be - thickness, sponginess, size, colour, dressing....and I was quite surprised to see that even Canadians vary their pancakes reasonably a lot from home to home - with one family they seemed more like crepes for example (with a hint of burning...perhaps that was not in the recipe!).

This is the recipe that for me guarantees the pancakes we have grown up with years of North American sitcoms, all happy and smiley around a long table with a large bucket of maple syrup poured on top of a massive pile of pancakes - did they eat the full length all in one go I've always wondered?

The secret? A generous amount of baking powder and a good few minutes whipping the eggs.

2 eggs
500ml milk
500g flour
2 tbsp baking powder
50g sugar
25g butter

Melt the butter and let it cool. Pour it in a jug and add the eggs and the milk. Whisk  savagely for at least 2-3 minutes. Mix the flour with the baking powder and slowly add it to the wet mixture continuing whisking. Make sure that you give a circular movement to the whisker so that the egg whites stiffen up slightly.
Let it rest for 10 minutes. You will see that the mixture starts forming small bubbles - this is the air that gets created and that will give that fluffiness to your pancakes.

Spoon out a ladle of the mixture onto a greased (with butter) hot pan and cook on high heat for each side for a minute or two or until golden. Flip your pancake and stack it on a warm plate. Depending on the pan you use the number will vary - if it is a 10-12cm pan you will get roughly 10 pancakes.

The original way to eat them is with a generous amount of maple syrup, blueberries - which you can eat them on the side or sprinkle on top of the pancakes once it's almost cooked - and crunchy bacon. Maple syrup, fruit, and bacon?!? I hear what you think but believe me, it goes well. Plus that's how Canadians eat them, and Canadians in this matter knows best. We had them in Toronto, Brunwsick, PEI (aka Prince Edward Island) and Cape Breton Island and they were all amazing!