Recipe : No Measurements Pancakes

It's Pancake Day! ... or Shrove Tuesday. Either way each year I always make a butt load of Pancakes today and I am always nominated as cheif pancake maker because well... I make the best pancakes. 

I, however, don't use any recipes as I was taught by my Nan how to make pancakes and it was an entirely 'by eye' method, but they always turn out great so I thought I'd share what I do.

First your ingredients.

Milk, Eggs and  Flour (usually plain). Simple.

Ignore the amounts this is just what I used for photos!

Most recipes say add flour first, then egg and then milk, I do it differently, how my Nan showed me.

1. Beat your eggs together. For this I use usually 3-4 medium eggs if I'm making it for 2-3 people, use less if it's just for you (1-2) and more for lots of people (4+).

2. Add milk. I add the milk until it turns a pale pastel yellow colour. (Shown below)

3. Now I add flour a little at a time until the mixture is a nice gloopy (or is it spelled gloppy?) consistency, so it starts to thicken to the point when you remove your whisk (or whatever you're mixing with) the mixture clings to it a little but is still liquid.

4. You want to mix this until there are no lumps at all and a thin layer of bubbles that do not pop form on the top of the mixture. 

5. Now you leave the mixture (my Nan leaves it overnight, but I'm not that patient) and get your frying pan ready. Turn your hob on to full heat, put your pan on the hob and add a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil. Once it's starting to heat move the pan around so it spreads the oil around.

6. The pan needs to be super hot so leave it for a little while.

7. Now you pour in a little bit of mixture, I make a big blob in the center of the pan and then swirl it around by moving the pan in the same way I did to spread the oil. I do this until the mixture is evenly and thinly spread over the whole base of the pan.

8. Leave it to cook until there is no wet mixture left, then using a wooden or plastic-type spatula lift a tiny bit of the edge of the pancake and go around the perimeter, lifting all the edge of the pancake off the pan.

9. Check to see if it's turning golden underneath, if it is, it's ready to be turned over; if not, leave for a little while longer.

10. To turn the pancake over just slide your spatula to the center of the pancake and insure it is not stuck to the pan anywhere, then flip it quickly.

11. Leave the pancake to cook until it turns golden underneath.

12. That's it the pancake is done and you're ready to add your toppings once you have transferred it to a plate! You may want to add a little more oil to the pan between pancake if your pan is non-stick or a little old.

Okay so I forgot to take photos of my finished pancakes but they usually come out pretty much the same as this... 

Now if you prefer your pancakes thinner than this, just add a little extra milk to your mixture until it doesn't stick to your whisk. Alternatively if you like them thicker, more scotch/american style, add more flour until it's just a bit thicker and is slow to form back together when stirred, OR use self raising flour instead of plain.

If you find your pancakes are coming out a little pale, add an extra egg.

With the amounts of ingredients I used, so 3 eggs as a base, I made 6 pancakes in a 24cm non-stick frying pan. To give you an idea of how much stuff you'll want to use. 

This may be useless to you, but it's what I do and I've never made a bad batch. It's also really flexible, if I fancy thinner pancakes that's fine, if I want thick ones, that's peachy!

Does anyone else use a similar recipe? Did this make sense to you?

If you're stuck or something doesn't make sense comment below and I'll get back to you ASAP!

Thanks for reading!

Birds in Blossom x

Valentines Cupcakes

For a little gift for my boyfriend this Valentines day I decided to make him some cupcakes. There are two ways you could go about this, making the cupcakes from scratch or box cupcakes. Usually I'd go from scratch but as there was an offer on the Betty Crocker boxes I bought two of them: The Vanilla Cupcakes and Red Velvet.

So these boxes I think were 2 for £4, so in my mind that was easier than buying in all the ingredients from fresh as I didn't have everything I needed in the kitchen (i.e flour, baking powder, icing sugar and a load of butter I only had half a tub left).

Additional ingredients needed than these boxes are, 30ml vegetable oil (2 tbsp), 60ml water (4 tbsp), 2 medium free range eggs. Then for the icing you will need 60g of soft butter and 2 tsp of water (10ml).

Then for my decoration I bought Love Hearts sweets(4 for £1), raspberry flavoured fudge (95p) and premade icing flowers (£1.95), all from Tesco as that's the local supermarket, there may be cheaper options elsewhere though.

So you need to preheat your oven to around 180°C (160°C for fan assisted ovens) or Gas Mark 4, my oven is gas but I find it always need to be one setting higher than the suggestion on the box (so Gas mark 5).

First you mix all the ingredients for your cupcakes in a bowl, doing each type of cupcake in a separate bowl of course! You then divide the mixture evenly between your cupcake cases. The box says it makes 9 but I didn;t use the cases that came in the box as they were a bit thin and floppy. I had some better muffin cases at home already so I used them instead. Because they are bigger I could only make 6 cupakes, with the mixture being just under halfway on the case.

 

  Then bake for 15-17 minutes. I put them on for 17 mins and found the Red Velvet cakes mixture was more watery at the start than the Vanilla ones, and they needed an extra 2 minutes at the end. That may be due to my oven though so just keep an eye on them!

While they were cooling I sorted out the Love Hearts sweets for the ones with the nicest message I wanted. So ones like 'I love you', 'True love' etc. rather than the ones like 'Hello' 'Just say no' and  'Cool Dude'... this took a while.

Then I prepared the other decorations, the Betty Crocker boxes came with chocolate sprinkles. I made the love heart stencils by cutting it out of the box the cake mix came in.

Once cool, I prepared the butter cream icing for both cupcake mixes. Just add the butter and the water to the icing sugar and mix lightly at first and then more vigorously when the powder was mixed in so it gets light and fluffy.

Note: The pink icing is far paler than on the box so if the colour you want is the one on the box you may want to get some red food colouring and add one or two drops to darken it up.

Now it's time to decorate! You could just spoon the buttercream onto the cupcakes but I used a piping bag I had in the cupboard, I snipped of the end so it was a wide opening and put the buttercream on in a large swirl that ended in the center it creates a nice even finish. If you refrigerate the buttercream it will be more defined once piped, if you do it straight away like I did, it 'melts' a little.

I put a large icing flower or a love heart in the middle of each cupcake, or I used both in some cases! Then I added the little flowers for detail, sprinkled a few raspberry fudge pieces to each cake and lastly I sprinkled the chocolate sprinkles on the Red Velvet cupcakes and the white chocolate sprinkles on all of them.

Then we're done!

I'm just displaying them on a heart napkin (£1) to make it look even more festive for Valentines Day and sprinkled some heart confetti (£1) around, both again from Tesco.

I am really impressed with the flavour of these cupcakes, I've never used Betty Crocker cupcake mixes before but I must say I am pleasantly surprised!

I actually would recommend them, they made a lot less mess than from scratch and were delicious, everyone who tried one loved them, though if I wanted to make a lot of cupcakes I would definitely rather do it from scratch.

So what do you think of them? Is using a box recipe a cop out? Are you baking your other half anything for Valentines?

As always, Thank you for Reading!

Birds in Blossom x

A Fresh Start (Again)

Here we go, I have decided to start a blog... obviously. Well, let me just say I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this, but at the minute it's going to be irregular posts about things on my mind or what I'm up to.

I suppose I'd better introduce myself.

Okay so, my name's Becky, I'm 20 years old and I'm a full time student studying in Manchester. There isn't much else of interest to tell you right now but I'm sure more will be said in the near future.

My main interests and what will be filling out this space are fashion & beauty, a bit of baking, my puppies (though both are far from being pups!) and maybe day to day outings... you know, all that jazz.

Any-hoo, that's a rap for now, not sure when or what the next post will be but hopefully I'll stick to this (this isn't the first time I've tried to set up a blog, not by a long shot) so thanks for reading!

Keep smiling,

BirdsInBlossom x