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Many of my grown up imaginings were informed by this introduction: most revolving around being a student, free from the shackles of my kind and loving family, living, I imagined, in something resembling Sara Crewe’s attic room in A Little Princess. Only with more scotch pancakes, thrown together with adult nonchalance. Probably for handsome but courteous gentlemen callers.
But then I found myself actually at college, in a tiny, garret attic room. Prime location for scotch pancakes. But we didn’t have hobs, or pans, or fires. My childhood dream of pancake-based domesticity was, you might say, scotched. So I lived on supermarket biscuits, microwaved cheese toasties, and some questionable scrambled eggs. And the less said about my gentlemen callers, the better.
But now, aged 29, I have a hob and a pan, and I make pancakes. I think my eight-year-old self would approve. She might even think I was, if not competent, at least grown up. It goes like this…
Makes: 8 squat pancakes
Takes: 2 minutes
Bakes: 10 minutes on the hob
150g self raising flour
90 g caster sugar
5 g salt
60-80 ml milk
3 eggs
20 g butter (for greasing the pan)
1. Place the flour, sugar, salt and eggs into a large mixing bowl. Gently whisk together until you have a thick, firm batter, almost like a loose ball of dough. Add the milk bit by bit until the dough smooths out into a thick but pliable batter. You may not need absolutely all of the milk. It should fall off the whisk reluctantly and quite slowly. If you go too far, add a little more flour in to even it out: this isn’t a terribly precise art.
2. Heat a frying pan over a medium heat. Drop about a quarter of the butter into the pan and swirl it around a little as it melts.
3. Spoon a heaped tablespoon of batter into the pan (the pancakes should be about the size of a take-way coffee lid). Allow the pancake to cook (no prodding) until you see tiny air bubbles appear on the uncooked surface of the pancake. The pancakes are ready to flip when a gentle shove causes them to skitter slightly across the pan. Flipping is stress free here: it demands a spatula and a gentle turn. Flip! Remove from the pan when this second side also responds to a gentle shove. Repeat with new batter. Flip!
4. At some point the butter will visibly darken. Carefully wipe the pan with kitchen roll, thick enough so that you don’t burn yourself, and add a new knob of the butter, and start again. Keep going until you’ve used up all the batter.
5. Ta Dah!
Icing on the cake
We started off eating these in the traditional way, with butter and jam, but both abandoned the jam after a while. I smeared Nutella all over mine, whereas my partner prefers them with nothing but butter. Which, all things considered, is quite a good way to approach life generally.
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