Rollin’s famous Counter-top Pancakes

Well, Mark has posted some of his thoughts about our trip to St. Louis, so I suppose it's time for me to tell the tale of the pancakes. As a teaser, you know it's a good story when Mark asks (before things were even cleaned up) how long I will be upset about someting before it becomes a story we can laugh about. Actually, it was more like "How long before we can tease you about this?"...

So, the basic recipe comes from (as I have discovered) an old Cuisinart recipe. Amy's Dad has made the recipe famous through the years to the point that we in the Bredenberg clan (i.e.- yours truly) decided to give it a whirl. It actually started when Amy and I were on a jet-lag preparation program that included eating mostly carbohydrates for dinner, but that's another story entirely. We got the recipe from the Pecks and made it a handful of times with great success.

I won't quote the recipe here, but it involved (curiously enough) using a Cuisinart to mix up egg whites with several ingredients, then transferring them to another container and mixing the egg yolks, butter, milk, etc. Then it all gets put together in the Cuisinart for a mixing with flour and a bunch of other stuff. I think it makes around 20 small-ish pancakes.

Now, this works great when you are cooking for a small-ish family. When you are about to prepare pancakes for 5 adults and 5 kids, however, it seems a bit on the light side. So, tinkerer that I am, I decided to double the recipe. Don't worry, gentle reader, the combined education represented by the people in the house at that point was staggering, and we successfully performed all of the high-level math required for such an operation. No ingredient foul-ups to mar this effort.

So, in went the egg whites and whipped until they were perfect, like a meringue. Then out they came and in went the egg yolks, butter and milk, combining to form a great base for any pancake. All was going swimmingly. Then I added the dry ingredients for the last little bit of preparation.

Now, if you have experience with a Cuisinart, you may see what is coming. It's not like a blender or some other well-engineered device (no, I'm not bitter...) that has a clearly specified capacity. Owing to the way the blade fits in, it is possible to lose ingredients out the bottom of the container.

And lose we did.

No sooner did I get all the dry ingredients in than I realized most of my wet ingredients were out and spreading all over the countertop. Being the quick thinker that I am, I stood there muttering under my breath with absolutely no idea what to do about it until someone handed me a towel.

This is about the time Mark asked when he could start teasing me about this incident.

While I cleaned up the counter, the Cuisinart, and a great many other things, my better half stepped in and made French toast for everyone so we could still get out the door on time.

So, let's review. What lesson did we learn? Don't double your recipes? Think about the limitations of your equipment? Be flexible and go with the flow?

Nah.

Don't use Cuisinarts. They're defective.

That, dear reader, is my story, and I'm sticking to it.