pancakes & ponies

last weekend i spent a night on a farm with an old friend of mine: persephone from Thesmophoria and co.. persephone and i have known each other for a long time and this weekend it meant the same thing to both of us: baking and sunshine. the weather in canberra had been quite questionable over the past few weeks and we were particularly excited about the weather forecast, as apparently very simple things make us happy. persephone was housesitting for some friends of hers at a farm about a 20 minute drive from canberra. there were ponies, dogs, chickens and a enormous garden filled with all kinds of lovely spring time flowers. we had a cute night of eating chocolate and watching movies, and in the morning woke up with a very sure plan of making pancakes. so that’s what we did.

i’ve already put a pancake recipe up here, but this one is a little more intense and indulgent for those days when you feel like it’s totally fine to have chocolate for breakfast because you’re a grown up and nobody’s here to tell  you otherwise. persephone is an absolutely amazing photographer and has been particularly focusing on her food photography as part of her blog thesmophoria and co. which i have linked above. her recipes are amazing and she definitely has the whole mouthwatering, perfectly lit photo thing down… pretty different from my rushed snaps taken on my slowly disintegrating iphone 5. so check it out if you like really delicious mostly traditional-german inspired vegan baked goods. or if you just like looking at pictures of food that you want to eat.

most of the images here are hers (except of course the ones that i have clearly taken of her while she is using a real camera haha). and the recipe is one we threw together in an effort to have pancakes as quickly as we could get them into us. it makes about 8 pancakes (but we made some pretty giant ones so you could probably scrape a few more if you wanted to.

 

For the Pancakes:

– 2 Cups Plain Flour
– 1/2 Cup Coconut Sugar
– 2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
– 1/2 Teaspoon Baking Soda
– 4 Teaspoons Ground Flaxseed
– 1/2 Teaspoon Vanilla Powder
– 1 – 1/2 Cup Soy Milk*
– 1/2 Cup Coconut Oil, Melted + 2 Tablespoons for frying
– 1/2 Cup Chocolate, Roughly Chopped

in a large bowl mix together all the dry ingredients with a whisk, till you think it’s pretty airy. add in melted coconut oil, and slowly add the soy milk (about half a cup at a time). for some reason pancakes always end up differently, so judge your milk amount by the consistency of the batter i reckon. it should be runnier than a cake batter, but not too liquidy. pancake batter is always better if you leave it to rest for a bit, so we just let it sit while we made the berry compote (which by the way was a really good plan and  i highly recommend making this too).

heat some coconut oil in a large skillet/frypan/whatever you’ve got. bring the heat up to melt the oil until it starts to sizzle and then turn it down again. the heating of pancakes is really hard to figure out, by i find that if you heat up the pan at the beginning and then cook them on a low heat it is the most sure way to get pancakes that are cooked all the way through and not burnt to shit. spoon the batter into the pan in whatever size you want, (this is the bit where you can add the chocolate pieces, or berries or whatever you want, best to do it here, not in the batter because then it sticks all weird and is a pain to clean/flip the pancake) wait until it begins to bubble and then flip. do not touch it before the top looks like it has a weird skin on it and is bubbly, it will fuck it up. once you flip it leave it for another minute or so until it puffs up and browns on the other side, this bit you kind of have to wing it to figure out timing, but it’ll be fine.

For the Berry Compote:
– 1 1/2 Cups Mixed Berries (fresh or frozen)
– 2 Tablespoons Rice Malt Syrup
– Zest of 1 Lemon
– Juice of 1/2 Lemon
– 1/2 Cup Water

put all the compote ingredients into a small saucepan and bring to the boil. as soon as it starts boiling, reduce it to a simmer and stir well making sure to combine all the ingredients. we left it on a simmer while we cooked our pancakes, but made sure to keep an eye on it and keep stirring so it didn’t turn to a gross, syrupy mess in the saucepan that would be a giant pain to clean up.

serve the pancakes with the compote and whatever else you want, we had more chocolate and bananas. it was reallllly good.

so there’s another pancake recipe… and another breakfast recipe, because it is definitely the best meal of the day, no question. have a fun time.

all my love,

charlie