Jim's Pancakes

With Thanksgiving  just around the corner, Allie decided this week that turkey pancakes were in order. Not just any turkey shape would do though, this had to look just like the turkey from her pop-up Thanksgiving book. Great.

Overall I think he turned out pretty good, as far as Turkey pancakes are concerned. I used some cocoa powder to make the brown color, the orange is from some marmalade and the red is my some Maraschino Cherry juice (one of my favorite new colorings!)

I made him in 3 parts: body, tail and feet. I assembled the body and tail together like one of those balsa airplanes…”Tab A goes into slot B”   The feet were added as a small blob on the griddle.

Next week we might try something using some cranberries for color!

Boo!  It’s that time of year to make some Halloween pancakes!  Here are a couple easy ones, I think I’ll attempt something a little more complex this weekend.  The ghost is really easy to make, the trick is to flip it over as soon as possible so that it stays white. You can cook it all the way through on the other side, it’s okay if that side turns brown.  For the pumpkin the trick is to cook the outline and the face for as long as possible before you fill it in. That way you’ll have some color variation between the outline and the body.

For these ones I just used some store-bought instant pancake mix, but I think I’ll try adding some canned pumpkin to the batter for the next batch. Pumpkin shaped pumpkin pancakes would be awesome

Here’s Allie saying BOOOO!

This one is super easy to make, you just have to make some circles and some “C” shapes for the door. Stack ‘em up and you’re done!  Yes, I admit that my bees could use a little work. I was trying to make them really small to match the scale of the beehive but they just turned into blobs. For the brown color I used cocoa powder in the batter, for the yellow I used some stale turmeric spice that we had laying around. Don’t use fresh turmeric because it can affect the flavor a bit.

Of course, you need to eat this pancake with honey, not syrup

Fall’s hottest fashions—Pancake earrings and bracelets. Allie was helping me make pancakes the other day and I told her to take off her dress-up bracelets so that they didn’t fall into the batter.  She wasn’t super happy about that, so we quickly came up with a solution: Pancake bracelets!  Of course, nothing goes better with pancake bracelets than pancake earrings, so we made a couple of those too. The only problem is that our dog was VERY interested in everywhere Allie went while wearing the bracelets, I guess they smelled pretty good!

After many weeks of Allie’s relentless begging, I finally made her a unicorn. The reason it took so long is because I am horrible at drawing horses, so I had to think it through to get it right. Allie chose the hair color too, very punk rock.

Allie requested a carousel this weekend.  A carousel? I didn’t think that she knew what a carousel was. I took her on one once, but that was a long time ago. I guess her memory is better than mine! Anyway, I was feeling up to the challenge and this is what we made:

I think it came out pretty good for a first try, but I think I’m going to have to revisit this one again. If I made the whole thing bigger I think I could get more detail in the animals. Right now I think they all look like fish.  The next challenge was the roof. I really wanted that “circus tent” effect so I decided to use a mold. We had a bundt cake pan that seemed like it could do the job, so I heated it up in the oven at 450 degrees and then spread batter around the inner wall.

I put it back in the oven to cook for a bit and it came out pretty good. I had to cheat a little and embed some wooden skewers into the carousel animals so that the roof would stay up, it was kinda heavy. I’ll have to revise my molding technique so that I can save some weight on these things. By the time I was done Allie had already had a bunch of pancakes, so I ate this one.  Not too bad…oven-cooked pancakes are actually pretty good.

Most fathers would have to go to Home Depot and buy some wood and nails to make a birdhouse for their kids. Not me. A little pancake batter and a hot griddle is all I need. Sure, birds can’t actually live in it and it wouldn’t last more than 5 minutes outside, but at least you can eat this one (Allie ate the whole thing!).