Pancakes, anyone?

For the last few weeks I've been making pancakes and bacon for breakfast on Sundays.  I think I'm going to try and stick with this routine; I feel like it makes the weekend a little more special.

I make my pancakes from scratch.  It's not terribly complicated once you get the hang of it and I love the flavor.  Not to mention the good feeling I get from making something from start to finish.  I use the recipe from my Fannie Farmer cookbook.  Doubling the recipe is a must because it doesn't take much longer to cook and then I get to have the leftovers for breakfast or snacks for a few days afterward.  The recipe below is already doubled so you don't even have to do any math.  Here we go!

1 3/4 cups milk
4 tablespoons melted butter 
2 eggs
1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cup whole wheat flour  
4 teaspoons baking powder
4 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt

First off, a few notes.  The Fannie Farmer recipe only calls for 1 to 1 1/2 cups of milk, but I like my pancakes to be a little lighter, so if you want a denser pancake use less milk.  It's also very important that the milk be at least at room temperature; I usually pour my milk into a measuring cup and then microwave it until it's slightly warm to the touch, but not hot.  As for the melted butter, let it cool off for a few minutes before using it.  It's important that the milk not be too cold or the butter be too hot, otherwise the butter will congeal when you add it to the milk, and that messes everything up.  Try to get the eggs slightly closer to room temperature, too.  Basically, you want the milk, eggs and butter to be as close to the same temperature as possible.

For real now, let's go!

Mix the milk, eggs and butter together.  In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients.  Add the dry ingredients all once to the wet once.  Stir until just combined, lumps are okay!  I find that putting some of the batter into a spouted measuring cup makes for easy pouring onto the pan.

 See the lumps?

Speaking of which, once you finish the batter, go ahead and and turn on the stove to medium/medium-low heat for your pancake pan.  You'll know the temperature is right when you flick some cold water onto it and the water droplets dance around and sizzle.

Pour the batter onto the pan in small amounts (I probably use about 1/8 cup of batter per pancake).  When you see bubbles coming through and bursting, go ahead and flip with a spatula.

Wait a slightly shorter period of time on the flipped side before removing them from the pan.  I heat up a plate ahead of time to help keep the pancakes warm and also use my microwave cover on them.  It's perfect because it keeps the heat in but lets the steam out so they don't get all soggy.

Part way through making the pancakes I heat up a pan and start cooking my bacon.  I'm still trying to master the art of properly cooking bacon, but it gets better every week.

Serve your pancakes with some maple syrup, jam or even plain.  Yum!