Apple Pancakes with Maple Syrup Butter
The book
"30-Minuten-Rezepte. Süße Verführungen." (Parragon Books Ltd., ISBN 978-1-4075-1514-4) was a present, by I am not quite sure anymore who gave it to me (Sorry to whoever...). I have a sweet tooth and this book has nothing but sweet stuff in it, but I don't think I've ever used it before. The recipes are ordered by season, so I chose one of the winter recipes - apple pancakes!
The ingredients
Pancakes
200g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
100g caster sugar
1 egg
200ml milk
2 apples, peeled and grated
1 teaspoon butter
Maple syrup butter
90g soft butter
3 tablespoons maple syrup
The recipe
Preheat the oven to 140°C. Sift flour, baking powder and cinnamon into a big bowl. Mix in the sugar and form a hole in the middle. Mix egg and Milk in an extra bowl and pour the mixture into the hole in the flour. Stir the egg and milk mixture, slowly adding more and more of the flour until it is all combined and you have a smooth dough. Add the grated apples.
Add the butter to a hot pan on medium heat. When the butter is sizzling, put 3-4 tablespoon-sized chunks of dough into the pan and fry for 1-2 minutes, until the dough produces little bubbles. Turn pancakes over and fry the other side until golden brown.
Once the pancakes are done, keep them warm on a plate in the preheated oven.
For the maple syrup butter melt the butter in a small pan with the maple syrup and stir until it's a smooth sauce. Serve the pancakes on small plates and pour the maple syrup butter on top.
The testing
I made these for our Sunday breakfast. The recipe promised that these would be ready to be served in 25 minutes, and in principle they might be right about that, but for me it took a bit longer, because:
1. I had to grate the apples first and made the mistake of using my grater/grinder thingy with the crank handle for that at first. It works well with e.g. almonds, but not for apples - the grated pieces got stuck in the machine and the only thing coming out of it was apple juice. So I quickly stopped using this finger-friendly option and used the mean little ordinary low-tech grater.
2. I was preparing the vanilla coffee at the same time.
3. My stove needs an extra setting between 3 and 4. 3 doesn't seem to be hot enough and the first batch of pancakes seemed to take forever, even though the pan should have been hot enough already. 4 seems to be too hot and one of the pancakes of the second batch was a bit too brown, too fast. Argh!
4. Preparing breakfast on an empty stomach, means I'm cooking while I'm in a bad mood, which means that minutes no longer seem to last 60 seconds and I was cursing at the apples, the grater, the pancakes, the maple syrup, the stove, my husband (poor thing!) and life in general. Now, in hindsight, I don't think it took much longer than those 25 minutes, only a bit, and maybe my kitchen tools and ingredients were not conspiring against me after all. Actually, looking at the whole process objectively and with a full stomach, these pancakes are very easy to make. Of course - they are just some bloody simple pancakes! What was I thinking...
I only used 50g of sugar, because 100g sounded like a lot, especially if the pancakes are served with syrup butter anyway.
The result
Haha! Thick, fluffy pancakes, with maple syrup butter dropping from top to bottom. Food porn!
The verdict
Thankfully, Roland was not holding a grudge against me after my rude remarks in the kitchen. Maybe the fact that the pancakes were delicious helped with that. He even said that these were the best pancakes he ever had in his whole life, even better than the ones from Herbstreet. I'm not quite sure about the last statement, but I agree that they were very, very good. Proof for the pancakes' goodness: according to the recipe these pancakes should feed 4 to 6 people - the two of us finished them all in one go! I think the dough would also work well with other fruits, like blueberries. 50g of sugar were completely sufficient, just like I thought.
Vanilla Café Latte
The book
No Sunday breakfast without a coffee drink! Usually we have a latte macchiato, but I thought I'd try a variation of the usual stuff. The title of "Coffee & Espresso" (Zabert Sandemann, ISBN 3-89883-122-1) suggests that the book only has coffee and espresso recipes, but that's not all. It also includes snacks and sweet treats that you might be able to get at coffeeshops. It also has a recipe for blueberry pancakes with maple syrup butter, so chances are their coffees go well with the pancakes from the other book, hehe.
The ingredients
1 vanilla bean
300ml milk
300ml hot, strong coffee
The recipe
Cut the vanilla bean in half, scrape out the seeds and put the seeds and the scraped out vanilla bean into a pot together with the milk. Bring milk to a boil, remove the vanilla bean and whisk the milk until foamy. Mix coffee and milk and a glass and serve. Add sugar to taste.
The testing
I was convinced that we still had vanilla beans at home, so didn't even bother checking. Big mistake! Of course, by the time I needed the vanilla bean it was nowhere to be found. Instead I fished the dried, scraped out pieces of vanilla beans from the sugar jar in which I store my home-made vanilla sugar and used some of that vanilla sugar as well for more vanilla taste. For the coffee I just used regular espresso, made with our little Italian espresso maker. And even though I told Roland that he was stirring the milk "the wrong way", now that I'm in a much better mood than this morning, I don't think there's something like "stirring the milk the wrong way". Ahem, sorry!
The result
Well, it's a coffee-milk drink served in a glass. Not much to see here. The milk foam had already vanished by the time I took the picture. My guess is that the milk was too hot to make a good foam.
The verdict
Didn't taste like it was worth the extra effort of boiling the milk with the vanilla bean. I sometimes drink my latte macchiato with a teaspoon of vanilla sugar and that tastes pretty much the same, but with nicer milk foam. Maybe if I had found that stupid vanilla bean it would have made a difference, but somehow I doubt it.
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