This morning I had the idea to use up some fresh strawberries I had that were getting to that too-soft-to-just-eat stage so I decided to incorporate them into my pancakes for today. I did estimate a good bit with the ingredients so don't panic about being utterly exact with the quantities. You want the pancake batter to be quite thick but still able to be dropped from your spoon into the pan without any help. I also found that before I reached the end of the batter it was starting to thin itself a little so I mixed more flour through to thicken it up a bit.
Ingredients
420g plain flour
6 tsp baking powder (or just use self-raising flour instead of plain and omit the baking powder)
large pinch of salt
100g golden caster sugar (you might need more if your strawberries are rather tart)
4 eggs
400g fresh strawberries
350ml semi-skimmed milk
2 tsp cinnamon powder
Method
1. Trim the strawberries, remove all stalks and any unripened areas (I also removed any areas that had gone squishy). Purée with a food processor (a blender or hand blender would work too) until smooth, or just pulse gently if you want little strawberry lumps within the finished pancakes. Pour into a measuring jug. For me 400g of strawberries turned into 350ml of strawberry purée. Add the milk to the strawberry purée and mix well.
2. Lightly grease your pan, I used a well known brand of butter substitute (don't use the light versions) and a tiny amount of rapeseed oil whenever the pan needed regreased throughout cooking, but just use whatever you would normally use for greasing/frying. Obviously using real butter would add a lovely flavour too. Put the pan on to heat up. You want to keep it hot enough to cook the batter but not so hot that you'll burn the outsides and the insides end up raw - it'll just depend on your cooker and you might need a few attempts to get it right.
3. Into a large bowl, sift the flour and baking powder, then add the cinnamon (I just estimated my amounts but you can adjust or even remove this totally, depending on how much you love cinnamon.) Then add the salt and finally the sugar.
4. Break the eggs into the flour and give a quick stir and then slowly add the strawberry/milk mix. You want a thick-ish batter so don't add it all in one go as you might find yourself having to add more flour instead. When you have the batter to a nice consistency make sure that all the ingredients are well stirred in and get ready to cook those pancakes!
5. Drop a spoonful of batter onto your pan. The size of the spoon depends on how big you want your pancakes to be! I used a large plastic kitchen serving spoon but only used about 1/2 to 1/3 of a spoon for each pancake. When the surface starts to form some bubbles use a fish slice or palette knife to flip the pancake over and cook on the other side. The time needed for each side depends on the heat of the pan and how thick the pancakes are so you might find the first couple don't work so well as the later ones when you're in the flow of how long each takes, but you want each side to be nicely golden without being too dark a brown.
6. Once cooked through, slide the pancake from the pan onto a clean tea towel. Keep going until all the batter is gone and you have a mountain of delicious pancakes! You can even do what I did and hope that they count as one of your five a day due to the strawberries inside. ;)
The yummy pile of pancakes I ended up with (minus a couple that may have mysteriously vanished before photo time):
And this just goes to show the love that goes into these pancakes. I burnt one accidentally and it just so happened to be in a heart shape. Some people see Jesus in their food, I just see love. Haha! ;)
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