In honor of Veteran’s Day (as a public school teacher, this means a day off of work) and the fact that it is actually cool and cloudy in the desert, I woke up wanting pancakes.
I rolled over in bed, and grabbed my copy of Vegan Brunch (from its special place on my bedside table). I flipped through to the pancake section, and there I saw it. A recipe for Pumpkin Pancakes. It called for 3/4 cup of pumpkin puree, which was perfect since I had 3/4 cup left over from last weekend’s Chocolate Pumpkin Nut Muffin extravaganza. I looked through the rest of the ingredients, and, wonder of wonders, had all of them!
Then, I read through the narrative (because Isa always gives great narrative along with her recipes) and saw that she suggested making a Ginger Cranberry sauce to accompany the pancakes. Again, due to some sort of recipe magic, I had all the ingredients required for the sauce! (Every autumn, when cranberries are sold constantly everywhere, I buy up about four bags to keep in my freezer. One year, I needed cranberries for an activity with my students in February and I couldn’t find them ANYWHERE! Ever since then, I have vowed to be well prepared when it come to cranberries.)
I started with making the Ginger Cranberry Sauce. It begins with a basic cranberry sauce recipe (cranberries, water, sugar.)
Cranberries are so bright and cheerful!
Then, you end up adding ginger and maple syrup. I failed to take a picture of that. But don’t worry, you’ll see the whole thing in a minute.
Next, I started with the pancakes. Instead of all purpose white flour, I used whole wheat pastry flour (or, like, 95% WW pastry flour. I ran out and needed to use a little bit of AP flour). I also upped the pumpkin spices a bit (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves). Aside from that, I followed the recipe as written.
So, my first pancake started out looking adorable.
Cute little pancake.
I flipped it and thing were still going okay.
Flipped pancake, still pretty cute.
But then when I tried to get it off the pan, something weird happened.
Weird wrinkled pancake.
I figured it was just “first pancake” syndrome, and went on to make the next pancake. Unfortunately, the next pancake looked like this:
Charred pancake. Not quite deliciousness.
I lowered the temperature and tried again.
I don't even know what happened here...
I was about to give up, but decided to try a different pan, a newfangled ceramic pan. Maybe they just didn’t like the cast iron (although the recipe said to use cast iron).
Things are starting to look up for my pumpkin pancakes!
Unfortunately, by the time I got to the last pancake, things were still quite unreliable. And this happened:
Basically, I'm a pancake failure.
I’m not quite sure what I was doing wrong with the pancakes. The outsides kept burning while the insides were super mushy. They tasted good, and since there wasn’t any egg, I wasn’t worried about salmonella with them being unevenly cooked. I just am not sure what I was doing wrong. (I kept increasing and lowering the temperature. Nothing quite helped.)
In the end, I did have a pretty delicious fall pancakey cranberry-y breakfast. Afterward, I was stuck in a pretty severe pumpkin pancake coma, and couldn’t seem to get up to get dressed and get on with my day. That was an unfortunate side effect.
Cute little pancake with delicious ginger cranberry sauce on top.
The sauce was really delicious, and aside from the second pancake (the super burned one), all the others seem to be edible. In the cooking process, I ate two pancakes (they were just too destroyed to eat on a plate!) and afterward I ended up eating three with the sauce. So, I think I’ve had my pumpkin pancake fill for the day.
Happy cloudy day.
chaoticvegankitchen 