Normally, my husband makes pancakes on the weekends.  He’s amazing at it.  He knows the right milk to mix ratio, the right cooking temperature, and even how to get the size of each pancake just perfect.  I, on the other hand, have no idea how to make pancakes.  I can read the directions and they still turn out like water crêpes.  Since it’s Father’s Day, I decided to make pancakes for my family.  It went about as well as you can imagine given the theme of my blog.

So here it goes:

The mix we use is super simple.  It’s a buttermilk pancake mix that we get delivered with our milk.  Yes, we get our milk delivered and it’s amazing.  Little old milkman and all.

The mix requires milk and butter, that’s it.  So super simple…. except the recipe says to not mix the ingredients “too much” so that the pancakes will be fluffier.  I have no idea what “too much” is so I just kind of fold the milk and butter into the batter.  I start cooking and by my surprise the pancakes are turning out half way decent.  They seem somewhat fluffy, they are browning about as evenly as my crappy stovetop burner will allow, and my goodness, they aren’t raw on the inside.  Score! Finally! I’ve hit the pancake jackpot!  This batch was fine, but for the second batch, you know what, I want them to be a little more on the crispy side.  You know what I mean?  Like, the kind of crispy that you get from IHOP or Cracker Barrel.  “Hmmm”, I wonder to myself, “how do they do it?  Maybe they add oil.  That must be it!”.  {Grabs oil from cabinet}

I’m a bit heavy handed with the oil and create a nice, more than generous, pond of oil in the pan.  I figure, “Meh, let’s see what happens”.  Terrible mistake.  I mean, absolutely terrible.  Here I am, literally deep frying this pancake batter.  I don’t even get half way through cooking the damn things and I pull them out of the pan.  Dripping in oil.  Then I pour the oil out into a bowl because I now know that this was a terrible idea.

However, that was the last of my batter…..crap.  So I mix up some more using what I thought was the same milk to mix ratio.  It was not.

Apparently, I was also heavy handed with the milk because the milk to mix ratio was WAY off.  Again, I didn’t “over mix” the ingredients, leaving me with very runny batter and tons of powder pockets in the pancakes, which are now (not frying) in the pan.  I guess I could have added more batter to the milky mix, but I didn’t want to end up in an endless cycle of “too much milk, too much batter”.  I decided to just go with it.

It wasn’t too terrible.  I mean, the texture was way off, but the flavor was totally that of buttermilk pancakes.  What do you think?  Would you eat these?

Below is the oily “crispy” pancakes in a bowl.  You can just imagine the musty, oily smell.

The finished product.  The fluffy ones are on the bottom.

Lesson learned: No matter what, do not, I repeat DO NOT make an oil pond in a pan to make crispy pancakes.  I don’t know how IHOP does it, but I need to find out.

Positive lesson learned:  My kids will eat anything if it’s topped with enough Nutella and maple syrup!