Pancake Day

Yes I know, we cheated!  But I am already armed with a list of excuses as to why we didn't attempt to mix our own pancake batter, including Simon was working late and didn't get home until 9:00 pm, we're pretty lazy and neither of us have attempted to make pancakes before. 

Pancake Day is something that we always celebrated back home in Norfolk, with three hungry kids and a husband my poor Mum would spend hours standing over the hob cooking up pancake after pancake.  She'd cook to order making sure that we all had our turn and got fresh hot pancakes delivered straight to our plates.  Being lovers of food we always managed to eat a ridiculous amount each which meant by the time we were done poor Mum didn't really fancy eating any herself.

When I moved to  London I never really celebrated Shrove Tuesday unless I felt like speeding out of work at 5:30 pm and joining the long queue of people standing outside My Old Dutch (anyone reading in London should go and check them out, they serve pancakes as big as your plate).

So this year I was determined that Simon and I would be celebrating our first Pancake Day living together by honouring the tradition and enjoying some as our evening snack.

Despite there being only two of us we went a little crazy with the toppings!   I chose black cherries and cream as that's what my Mum always did for us and then I also insisted on getting some lemon for a more traditional lemon and sugar combination.  Simon chose a classic, Maple Syrup.

Now we come to the part where it all went a bit wrong.  I bought the wrong kind of cherries!  Mum always served our pancakes with bright red, thick sugary cherries which I'm realising now was probably pie filling.   The can that I picked up ended up being cherries with stones sitting in slightly sugary water.   I was a little gutted as I was very excited to introduce Simon to my favourite pancake filling and it demonstrates yet again that no matter how hard I try I will never be a domestic goddess.

Cooking the pancakes proved to be a little more difficult than we'd imagined, our first few attempts looked like scrambled eggs and Simon was having a great time swearing at the frying pan.  It took us about four goes before we finally managed to get our pancakes to form a respectable circle (ish) shape.

I've seen so many beautiful photographs today of people's perfectly formed pancakes, decorated like a piece of art with lovely toppings that they've carefully picked out of their heart shaped bowls.  Well I'm afraid you won't see any of that here.   I tried to arrange my pancake to make it look wonderful for my blog but the reality is I'm not very artistic, I'm just me .. and I was very happy that we'd managed to make one that looked like a pancake so I quickly threw a heap of banana, cream, caramel sauce and ice-cream on it before wolfing it down.

So here goes ... I proudly present, my pancake!

Hey there's always next year!