It’s supposed to be Spring. The sun is supposed to be out. The weather should be warming up. But Mother Nature didn’t seem to get the memo. It is snowing almost everywhere in the UK today.
I’ve been craving The Breakfast Club‘s HamSoEggcited for some reason. I think it was because of the weather and the fact that I wasn’t feeling very well (I’ve got a bad cold, if anyone’s interested in offering tea and sympathy!). In my head, HamSoEggcited would cure all my ills. I had visions of lovely fluffy pancakes, melting cheese sandwiched in ham slices and a perfectly fried sunny side up egg with the yolk all gooey and runny!
But because London wasn’t exactly a hop, skip and jump away, I thought I’d try to replicate it in my tiny kitchen. I found a great recipe for fluffy pancakes recently and tweaked it so that the pancakes were how I wanted them to be. I had gammon ham in the fridge and cheese that needed using up so I set about recreating the sweet-savoury pancake stack.
My recipe for fluffy pancakes is below:
Ingredients:
- 135g self-raising flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp salt
- 3 tbsp caster sugar
- 150ml milk
- 1 large egg, lightly beaten
- 30ml melted butter or olive oil
- butter to cook pancakes
Directions:
- Combine the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a large bowl with a balloon whisk (I love using a balloon whisk to mix dry ingredients because it does it really quickly and really well!).
- In a jug, whisk the egg and milk together. Then add the olive oil.
- Combine the flour mixture and the egg-milk mixture and beat until you have a smooth batter. If there are any lumps, this should disappear soon with a little more mixing. Let the batter stand for a few minutes.
- Heat a non-stick frying pan over medium heat and add a knob of butter and swivel the butter around to coat the pan, until all the butter has melted. Add a ladle of the batter to the pan. The batter will be thick, but don’t worry because this is how the batter should be. Wait for the pancake to bubble and for the bubbles to burst. Loosen the edges with a fish slice and flip over. Cook until both sides are slightly golden brown. The pancake should rise to about 1 cm thick.
- Repeat until all the batter is used up. This makes 4 large pancakes. I know that might not sound like much but a stack of 2 pancakes are more than generous for one person!
- Serve with lashings of syrup of your choice, and extra butter if you are so inclined!
To make the HamSoExcited, I kept each pancake warm in a low oven and each time I made a pancake, I stacked it with a folded piece of gammon with a slice of cheese inside (the gammon). I did a stack of 3 pancakes and doused the pancakes (VERY liberally) with golden syrup (because I’d run out of maple syrup). Leaving the pancakes in the oven while I cooked the eggs gave the pancakes a little crunch. When I placed the fried egg over the pancake stack I had to take a photo because it was soooooo pretty. Probably not as pretty as The Breakfast Club’s HamSoEggcited but it was close enough, I thought. It certainly tasted like it!
I posted the photo on Instagram and the people managing The Breakfast Club’s instagram account thought it was a pretty impressive effort!
Yellywelly 