Happy Pancake Day!
February 21st, 2012
Happy Pancake Day! If you haven’t already tucked into a stack of pancakes, crepes, flapjacks, pikelets or other sweet or savoury treats, now’s the perfect time to grab the ingredients you’ll need to round out the day (geddit?) with a batch.
Unlike many other arbitrary food holidays (which are often the invention of food manufacturers as a marketing ploy), Pancake Day has a traditional origin. Shrove Tuesday became associated with pancakes as it was the best way to use up the sugar, eggs and other sweet and rich ingredients that would become unavailable to observers of the 40 days of ritual fasting during Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday the following day. This origin is broadly shared by Carnivale (roughly translated as “farewell to meat”) and Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”).
But whatever the day’s origins, today is as good a day as any to indulge your sweet tooth or experiment with some new savoury fillings.
There’s no end to the number of pancake recipes available online, from very basic options through to complex flavoured varieties. For a simple starting point, try the basic pancake and basic crepe recipes from Taste.com.au. For a gluten-free option, try the berry and chocolate buckwheat hotcakes recipe, found in Indulge by good friend of Appliances Online, Rowie Dillon.
One important factor when cooking up your pancakes is to get the temperature of your pan just right and keep it that way – too high and you’ll annihilate your batter; too low and you’ll end up with a sticky, half-cooked mess. You can maintain an even temperature by cooking on a reliable cooktop from Appliances Online (induction cooktops offer very precise control over temperature and are simple to wipe clean when a gooey mishap inevitably occurs), or an electric frying pan.
If you’ve got a favourite pancake recipe, topping or trick for flawless preparation, please feel free to share it with us so that everyone can experience excellence in pancakes, no matter what day it is.
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