One of the things I geek out about is creative cooking, and one of my favorite things to make in the Fall is pumpkin pancakes. Sometimes I add semisweet chocolate chips and sometimes pecans. Every once in awhile I go crazy and make them from scratch. I am always looking for new pancake recipes and even dabbled in making cinnamon apple ones. Grating the apples for that recipe took forever and my knuckles had a few injuries, but they were tasty. (The pancakes, not the knuckles!)
Recently I came across a blog entitled Jim's Pancakes that combines geeky cooking with one of my favorite things: pancakes! Jim professes to be a dad that makes "cool pancakes" for his daughter, but the man is a pancake artist.
I was inspired by his site to try some pancake creations of my own. I mixed up a batch of pumpkin pancakes and put the batter into a mustard bottle that you can buy anywhere. Mistake number one. The mustard bottle top was too skinny to let the batter out and it kept clogging up. So, I got out my candy bottle that I use to squeeze chocolate out of. The hole in the top is much larger and it worked perfectly. (These are available everywhere, including that giant store that starts with a Wal and ends with frustration at the long checkout line.)
I started out trying to make a jack o'lantern. I squirted out eyes, nose, and mouth and then filled in the shapes. It turned out okay, but tore in several places when I was trying to take it off the griddle. One of my blobs of batter took on a shape reminiscent of Casper and I was inspired to make a ghost. That ghost turned out so so. I had to make him so small that his eyes and mouth filled in with batter. Since his eyes filled in with batter, I had the idea to use chocolate chips for the eyes which worked pretty well. So I started racking my brain for other Halloween shapes and ended up with a simple moon and another ghost. Then, I got ambitious and tried a Frankenstein. Second mistake. I was too ambitious, but the shape looked familiar. I flipped that shape upside down, added a couple of chocolate chip eyes and voila!
Blinky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde! These ghost shapes were easy to make and looked so cute with the chocolate chip eyes. I quickly made three more ghosts and then did a few pancake batter dots. You could even take it a step further like Jim does and color your pancake batter. Seeing as I was working on borrowed time while my six month old slept, I opted to not color the batter and just surprised my daughter with a little PacMan scene. Being a child of the 80's, her GeekMom has already introduced her to the amazing world of Pac-Man. My daughter got to gobble up a Pac-Man vignette for her Saturday morning breakfast and we got to spend some quality girl time giggling over pancakes.
