This recipe is named for those good intentions we have at the start of the New Year to eat more healthily. The recipe comes from Weight Watchers, a terrific organisation to help us get back to the straight and narrow after the excesses of the festive season!
It’s also called Two Ingredient Pancakes, as the basic pancake has only two ingredients, banana and eggs. To serve, I added fresh fruit and no-fat yoghurt, which still make it a low calorie brekkie! For a little bit of pizazz, serve the pancakes with a drizzle of maple syrup or honey.
Ingredients
1 medium banana
2 free-range egg whites
1 medium free-range egg
To serve, pineapple, raspberries, no-fat yoghurt and maple syrup or honey.
Method
Combine the banana, egg whites and whole egg in a food processor and process until smooth.
Heat a nonstick frying pan over a medium heat. You don’t need cooking oil spray, but spraying a little in the pan won’t hurt if you’re worried about the pancakes sticking. Drop a tablespoonful of the batter into the frying pan. Cook for 20 seconds on one side or until golden brown, then flip the pancake and cook for a further 20 seconds. You need to be careful cooking the pancakes as they brown very quickly. Repeat with the rest of the batter – you will probably get at least 4 medium pancakes.
Serve the pancakes topped with the no-fat yogurt, a pile of pineapple chunks*, fresh raspberries and a little maple syrup if you dare!
* A great idea to make the pineapple super sweet, is to dry fry the chunks in a frying pan over medium to high heat, for a minute or two – cooking carmelises the sugar – they taste fantastic!
I have been making crumpets this week. They are such a great breakfast staple and a lovely afternoon tea treat.
I used my buttermilk crumpets recipe as I had some beautiful buttermilk from Pepe Saya, the Australian experts on all things dairy cultured! The link to their website is here.
So I thought I would revisit that recipe as well as my sourdough crumpets recipe. The buttermilk recipe is very easy to do as it uses commercial yeast. The sourdough recipe is fantastic, but you do need a sourdough starter on hand.
If you’re in need of making something indulgent this weekend – waffles may be the answer! And particularly if you’re in a part of Australia that’s in lockdown, I hope this might cheer you up.
I found a good recipe by the inimitable Martha Stewart for buttermilk waffles. Very easy and very quick. However, I must fess up and explain that the first waffles were rather flat and a bit disappointing. So I added spoonful or so of extra flour and anothter 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder to the remaining mixture. This did the trick and the the rest of the waffles were thick and fluffy! However, I hope that if you followed the inimitable Martha’s recipe as is, it will work out fine for you.
I included my recipe troubleshooting as I always like to be as accurate as possible as I describe my cooking experiences.
I served the waffles with some cookie crumbs – I crushed up a couple of cookies I had left over. Add a good drizzle of golden syrup, some whipped cream and a few raspberries and strawberries and you’re in the waffle breakfast business!
Ingredients
2 cups plain (all-purpose flour)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon bi-carbonate soda (baking soda)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
2 free-range eggs
Method
Preheat oven to 150 degrees C.
In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, bi-carbonate of soda and salt. In a large bowl, whisk together buttermilk, butter, and eggs, then add the flour mixture, and mix until batter is just combined.
Heat the waffle maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions and brush with a little oil. Pour batter onto the grid, spread batter if necessary, but make sure you don’t overfill the grid. Close the waffle maker and cook until the waffles are golden brown and crisp, 3 to 5 minutes.
The waffles will be cooked but maybe a little soft. At least mine were. Put them in the preheated oven for a couple of minutes to crisp up and also to keep them warm.
Make the rest of the waffles in the same way. Serve with golden or maple syrup, whipped cream or yoghurt and fresh fruit – berries are great! And cookie crumbs for some extra luxe!
There’s always a dilemma when making sourdough, that is, what to do with left over starter. I often add sourdough starter to baking with man-made yeast, for added rise and that extra sourdough flavour.
Making sourdough crumpets is another favourite. There are recipes that suggest only using starter, with bicarbonate of soda added of course. Having tried these recipes, I’m not a fan of the resulting intensely “sour” flavour of the crumpets.
So I have experimented with a few versions and have come up with a recipe that is now my go-to crumpet recipe. In fact it’s easier than ordinary recipes involving man-made yeast!
The quantities are simple: equal amounts of strong flour, sourdough starter and water, plus a little salt and sugar and the bicarb. No proving or waiting involved. And the result is beautiful, flavoursome, dense crumpets complete with those crumpet holes!
Ingredients
200g strong flour
200g sourdough starter
200g water
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2-3 tablespoons butter for cooking/greasing
Method
You will need a fairly large frying pan for the recipe plus crumpet rings. I used to use silicone egg rings until I invested in proper metal crumpet rings. The egg rings are fine, but I do like the stability of the metal rings.
Mix the flour, sourdough starter and water to a smooth paste. Add the salt and sugar and mix again. Add the bicarb. At this stage you will see some bubbles from the bicarb reaction. I get varying degrees of bubbles but I find that the crumpets still do their thing even when there are less bubbles.
Add a tablespoon of butter to the pan and melt over low heat. Once the butter melts, use a pastry brush to carefully butter 4 crumpet rings. I use this method as it saves on melting butter separately. Add another tablespoon of butter, turn up the heat to medium and leave the rings in the pan to heat up.
Now it’s time to cook the crumpets. Several important things to remember. Clean the crumpet rings in between cooking and butter again, otherwise the crumpets are in danger of sticking. Fill the crumpet rings half to three quarters full. Half for a traditional size crumpet and three quarters for a whopper size. I like my crumpets thick but I’ve learned from experience that filling the rings with too much mixture means the crumpets spill over the top and quite frankly end up so thick they don’t fit in the toaster!
Cook the number of crumpets that can fit in your pan. In my case, I can cook three at a time. I’ve always got the fourth ring ready to go with more mixture. Keep on cooking until you’ve used all the mixture. I usually get 6-9 crumpets from a mixture.
Fill each ring with the required amount of mixture and leave for a good 6-10 minutes to cook. The crumpets should rise and have almost cooked through. Remove the rings with tongs and flip over. The crumpets should be brown underneath. (If you can’t remove the rings don’t worry, turn the crumpets over in the rings and then remove the rings once cooked.)
Cook for a couple of minutes on the second side until brown. Remove from the pan. I find that the crumpets don’t all cook at the same rate so I remove them at different times.
Use the remaining tablespoon of butter as necessary to butter the rings for the next round of crumpets and also to add a little more butter to the pan as you cook more crumpets.
A word on holes. When you cook the first side, after a few minutes you will see the trademark holes forming on the top. The holes develop and pop as the mixture dries out.
I give the holes a helping hand, by popping the emerging holes with a skewer. I think this is quite acceptable as the ultimate aim in having holes is to allow more butter to be absorbed!
The crumpets, as is traditional, need to be toasted. Don’t be tempted to eat them untoasted just because they are freshly made!
I make these crumpets whenever I have left over starter after bread making and sometimes I top up my starter just to make a batch of crumpets.
They also freeze beautifully – I always have a few packs of crumpets ready to unfreeze and then toast.
I serve them with lots of butter and good quality honey or jam. In the photos I served them with my homemade strawberry conserve, recipe here.
If you’re a dedicated sourdough bread maker, this is the perfect recipe to use that precious starter you have worked so hard to develop and want to put to good use.
When I first started this blog in 2013, I was keen to post lots of different culinary experiences as well as my own cooking efforts. So writing up a great meal is obligatory!
We had a memorable breakfast back then, cooked in the beautiful Hunter Valley, one of the best wine districts in NSW, if not in Australia, on a weekend retreat.
The brekkie was cooked by “the doctors”, two of my oldest and dearest friends. They cooked Bill Granger’s buttermilk pancakes and French toast, and the link to that post is here.
Here we are in 2018 and the doctors have done it again, cooking Bill’s buttermilk pancakes for breakfast, this time in Terrigal, a beachside locality on the central coast of NSW. The doctors have wisely decided to make Terrigal their other home, and we were lucky enough to have a relaxing weekend at their new abode.
Doctor B served the pancakes with fresh fruit, mango yoghurt and lashings of maple syrup. I probably shouldn’t have, but I just needed to add a spoonful of Nutella…
Ingredients 250g plain flour 3 teaspoons baking powder a pinch of salt 2 tablespoons sugar 2 free-range eggs, lightly beaten 750 ml buttermilk 75g unsalted butter, melted Unsalted butter, extra, for greasing the pan
Method Stir the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together in a bowl. Add the eggs, buttermilk and melted butter and whisk to combine. Heat a large non-stick frying pan over a medium heat and brush a small portion of butter over the base. For each pancake, ladle 1/3 cup of batter into the pan and cook for about 2 minutes, until bubbles appear on the surface. Turn the pancakes over and cook for another minute. Transfer to a plate and keep warm while cooking the rest of the pancakes.
PANCAKES! Always a great breakfast option, unless it’s hotcakes, waffles or crumpets! I really love a home made version of any one of these griddle cooked goods.
So Jamie Oliver’s recipe for Smoothie Pancakes with Berries, Banana, Yoghurt and Nuts makes thick luscious and surprisingly healthy pancakes – they could even be described as hotcakes.
I’m re-blogging this gorgeous recipe that comes from Jamie’s book Everyday SuperFood.
Here is Jamie’s recipe very slightly tweaked.
Ingredients
320g blueberries or raspberries
1 ripe banana
170ml semi-skimmed milk
1 large free-range egg
250g wholemeal self raising flour
To serve
4 tbs natural yoghurt
Sprinkle of ground cinnamon
30g mixed unsalted nuts, chopped
Drizzle of honey
Method
Blitz half the berries, peeled banana, milk, egg and flour in a food processor or blender to make a smooth pancake batter. Fold in the remaining berries. Place a large non-stick frying pan on a medium high heat. When hot, put some batter into the frying pan to make large pancakes or small ones. I went for smallish. Cook for a couple of minutes on each side, or until crisp and browned. Jamie suggests flipping them for an additional 30 seconds each side to ensure they are super crispy. This seemed to work for me.
You can serve whole, or slice the pancakes in half so you can see the fruit. Serve with a spoonful or two of yoghurt, a sprinkling of cinnamon, some chopped nuts and a drizzle of honey.
This morning I really felt the need to make waffles, and obviously, eat them too..
I have a “good” heavy duty waffle maker, and because it’s so cumbersome, I don’t tend to get it out of the cupboard that often. I recently bought a light weight waffle maker from one of those generic super stores where you can buy anything for ridiculously low prices. So this was the trial run and I’m happy to say the light weight waffle maker passed the test.
I followed a Martha Stewart recipe for buttermilk waffles. Very easy and very quick. However, I must fess up and explain that the first waffles were rather flat and a bit disappointing. So I added spoonful or so of extra flour and anothter 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder to the remaining mixture. This did the trick and the the rest of the waffles were thick and fluffy! However, I hope that if you followed the inimitable Martha’s recipe as is, it will work out fine for you.
I included my recipe troubleshooting as I always like to be as accurate as possible as I describe my cooking experiences.
Martha’s original recipe is here. I served the waffles with some macadamia cookie crumbs – I crushed up a couple of cookies I had left over. Add a good drizzle of golden syrup, some whipped cream and a few raspberries and strawberries and you’re in the waffle breakfast business!
Ingredients
2 cups plain (all-purpose flour)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon bi-carbonate soda (baking soda)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
2 free-range eggs
Method
Preheat oven to 150 degrees C.
In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, bi-carbonate of soda and salt. In a large bowl, whisk together buttermilk, butter, and eggs, then add the flour mixture, and mix until batter is just combined.
Heat the waffle maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions and brush with a little oil. Pour batter onto the grid, spread batter if necessary, but make sure you don’t overfill the grid. Close the waffle maker and cook until the waffles are golden brown and crisp, 3 to 5 minutes.
The waffles will be cooked but maybe a little soft. At least mine were. Put them in the preheated oven for a couple of minutes to crisp up and also to keep them warm.
Make the rest of the waffles in the same way.
I served the waffles with the aforementioned cookie crumble, golden syrup, whipped cream and raspberries and strawberries. Serve them with whatever takes your fancy!
Weight Watchers is a fabulous organisation with a no fuss, straightforward approach to weight loss. They provide a wealth of great recipes online that can be created easily and quickly. Many of their recipes are “0 points”, meaning that they tick the box as having ingredients which don’t count towards the points total in the WW food plan.
This recipe is so named as the basic pancake has only two ingredients, banana and eggs. To serve, I added fresh fruit and no-fat yoghurt, which are also 0 points. For a little bit of pizazz, I did serve my pancakes with a drizzle – or maybe a slurp – of maple syrup!
Ingredients
1 medium banana
2 free-range egg whites
1 medium free-range egg
To serve, pineapple, raspberries, no-fat yoghurt and maple syrup.
Method
Combine the banana, egg whites and whole egg in a food processor and process until smooth.
Heat a nonstick frying pan over a medium heat. You don’t need cooking oil spray, but spraying a little in the pan won’t hurt if you’re worried about the pancakes sticking. Drop a tablespoonful of the batter into the frying pan. Cook for 20 seconds on one side or until golden brown, then flip the pancake and cook for a further 20 seconds. You need to be careful cooking the pancakes as they brown very quickly. Repeat with the rest of the batter – you will probably get at least 4 medium pancakes.
Serve the pancakes topped with the no-fat yogurt, a pile of pineapple chunks*, fresh raspberries and a little maple syrup if you dare!
* A great idea to make the pineapple super sweet, is to dry fry the chunks in a frying pan over medium to high heat, for a minute or two – cooking carmelises the sugar – they taste fantastic!
Here are two fantastic recipes for pancakes using the same basic batter.
Both pancake batters have no refined sugar!
The intense sweetness of the pineapple pancakes comes from cooking the pineapple in a frying pan until caramelised and luscious. The blueberry pancakes are served with a little golden syrup to provide a sweet contrast to the slightly tart blueberries.
These pancakes are a riff from Jamie Oliver’s Pineapple Pancake Mess from his “Super Food Classics”, see here for Jamie’s original recipe. I was keen to cook a recipe using pineapple – so many in the markets now, at the height of Sydney summer.
My two versions are fairly simple in flavours, with vanilla and cinnamon in the batter. Both are served with fruit and natural yoghurt.
Ingredients
Pancake Batter
150g plain wholemeal flour
30g self-raising flour
300ml semi-skimmed milk
1 large free-range egg
1 tsp vanilla paste or vanilla extract
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Pinch of sea salt
Vegetable oil for the frying pan
For the Pineapple Pancakes
1 ripe pineapple
2 tbsp natural yoghurt
20g or a handful of macadamias lightly crushed
For the Blueberry Pancakes
1 punnet (200g) fresh blueberries
2 tbsp natural Greek yoghurt
1 tbs golden syrup
Method – Pineapple Pancakes
Make the batter first and let it stand while you cook the pineapple.
Mix the flour, milk, egg, vanilla, cinnamon and sea salt together, in a blender or by hand. It’s pretty simple to just mix by hand which is what I did.
Cut the ends off the pineapple, then the skin, quarter it lengthways and cut away the core. Chop the flesh into 1cm pieces.
Put the pineapple pieces into a frying pan on a medium high heat, and cook the pineapple for 5 to 10 minutes, or until caramelized, turning regularly, then remove to a plate.
For the pancakes themselves, use half of the batter.
Drizzle a little oil into a frying pan on a medium heat, tipping out any excess. You just to make sure the pancake don’t stick.
Add a couple of tablespoons of batter to the frying pan. Cook until bubbles appear on the top of the pancake, then turn and cook on the other side until golden brown. Remove to a plate while you make the rest of the pancakes.
Repeat the process, stacking up the pancakes as you go and covering with foil to keep warm.
Serve the pancakes layered with the caramelised pineapple pieces, with natural yoghurt, crushed macadamias and a drizzle of the pineapple juices.
Method – Blueberry Pancakes
Add half of the blueberries to the other half of the batter, stirring them in. You can keep them whole or crush a few into the batter.
Cook the batter as for the pineapple pancakes. They may need a little longer on each side as they are quite moist.
Serve the pancakes with the rest of the blueberries, the natural yoghurt and a little golden syrup.
Waffles! I always thought they were hard to make until I started using a waffle maker, a present from years ago, that I found at the back of a kitchen cupboard. Et voila! From batter to plate in 15 minutes. So yummy, and they look pretty groovy too!
I made these last weekend and served them with a drizzle of golden syrup, a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar and good dollop of sour cream to undercut the sweetness. Magic breakfast!
Ingredients
110g plain flour
20g cornflour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tbls dark brown sugar or muscavado sugar
190ml buttermilk
30ml vegetable oil
1 free-range egg separated
To serve
Golden syrup, cinnamon sugar, sour cream or creme fraiche
Method
Heat an electric waffle maker for a few minutes. Put the flour, cornflour, baking powder and salt in a bowl and mix by hand to combine. Add the buttermilk, oil and egg yolk and whisk until smooth.
Put the egg white into another bowl and whisk until stiff peaks form. Gently fold the whisked egg white into the flour mixture. Carefully ladle 2 tablespoons of batter (or enough to cover the waffle plate) into the waffle maker. Cook until the waffle is a nice dark golden brown – my waffle maker lets me check the state of doneness simply by opening up and having a look. Carefully remove the cooked waffle to a warm plate and continue making.
Serve with golden syrup, cinnamon sugar and sour cream or creme fraiche. Makes about 6 waffles.
Weight Watchers is a fabulous organisation with a no fuss, straightforward approach to weight loss. They provide a wealth of great recipes online that can be created easily and quickly. Many of their recipes are “0 points”, meaning that they tick the box as having ingredients which don’t count towards the points total in the WW food plan.
Here are two fantastic recipes for pancakes using the same basic batter.
Ingredients
The Quirk and the Cool 