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Scottish Pancakes – Sweet, fluffy, delicious pancakes served with honey and berries.
Hi-yo! Happy start to the week, friends!! We’re welcoming this beautiful Monday with a stack of Scottish (uhh, ha?) Pancakes!
Do you know how many loops, hoops, and whatnot I had to go through to get this recipe? MANY!
Lemme tell you how all this got started.
One word. Pinterest.
Sometime last year I saw this beautiful stack of pancakes in my Pinterest feed and I was drawn in immediately. I was ready to make it, eat it, love it!
As I clicked over, giddy as can be, I was led to a site that had me click over to another site, to then click over to another and then another… arrrrgh. Darn you, internet! Help a girl out! I almost LOST it! But, fortunately, one more click did the trick. Finally, I had the recipe.
Orrrrr did I? muahahaha (<—- I’m doing Dr. Evil’s pinky-to-mouth gesture.)
As soon as I started to work on said recipe in my kitchen, I thought, this looks way too familiar… and it was! I had made that recipe once before and it was La Fuji Mama’s recipe for Japanese Hotcakes. Delicious hotcakes, by the way, but the pancakesI was looking forwere not those.Back to the drawing board.
Are you sick of my story, yet?? Think about how I felt! Just work with me here.
Several hundred google-searches later, I found what I was looking for. FYI: “very tall fluffy pancakes” =74,800 google results.
SCOTTISH PANCAKES
Soon after nailing it down, I called my 1/4-Scotch uncle to ask about these pancakes. The dude gave me the recipe in less than 2 seconds. He knew exactly what I was talking about! He’s also a trained chef, so this question worked out in his favor.
However, his recipe was all in grams and he lost me. When I asked about translating all that to cups, he said, “Bakers work with grams“. Okey, dokey, then…Good thing I’m not a trained baker!
Buuut, I had no choice! Everywhere I looked for Scottish Pancakes, it was all in grams. So I whooped out my kitchen scale and got to work. While all that worked out perfectly, and the pancakes came out so deliciously tall, I still was not satisfied with the height.
Therefore, my dear friends, I did the next best thing. I whooped out my biscuit cutter, I then poured the batter inside the cutter and VOILA! The tallest pancakes in all the world are right before your eyes! Thus, if you are not satisfied with the tall pancakes that this batter produces, bring out the biscuit cutter. It works wonders. Obvi.
Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon, sugar, and salt in a mixing bowl and mix until well incorporated.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg, milk, vanilla, and melted butter.
Pour the eggs mixture into the flour mixture and stir just until incorporated; do not overmix. The batter should be thick and a little lumpy; if it is too thick to work with, add a bit of milk. Set the batter aside for 10 minutes.
Heat a heavy-bottomed, non-stick pan over low-medium heat and coat it with oil. DO NOT use all the oil at once; pour enough to coat the bottom of the pan.
Drop the batter, 1/4 cup per pancake, into the pan.
Cook until the first side is golden brown and the top surface forms bubbles.
Flip and continue to cook until golden brown on all sides.
Add more oil as needed.
Serve immediately, drizzled with honey or maple syrup and fresh berries.
Nutritional info is an estimate and provided as courtesy. Values may vary according to the ingredients and tools used. Please use your preferred nutritional calculator for more detailed info.
Today's Scotch pancakes are still different to English ones: smaller, daintier, sweeter and richer than their English counterparts,” says Mary-Anne before adding: “Scotch pancakes or drop scones are delicious eaten just with butter.
Sift the flour and sugar into a bowl and make a well in the centre. Add the melted butter, the egg and half the milk. Mix together, then slowly stir in the remaining milk to make a smooth, thick batter. Heat a large frying pan until hot.
Over-mixing pancake batter develops the gluten that will make the pancakes rubbery and tough. For light, fluffy pancakes, you want to mix just until the batter comes together—it's okay if there are still some lumps of flour. Fat (melted butter) makes the pancakes rich and moist.
The tradition of making pancakes was designed to use up all the 'forbidden' foods before Lent in order to avoid spoiling and waste. A pancake was a 'cake' cooked on a heated flat-surface; historically a bakestone, hearthstone or griddle, and eventually a pan.
To this day, pancakes go by many names, such as flapjacks or slapjacks. Both Scotch pancakes and American flapjacks are cooked the same way with some hot oil or melted butter on a griddle or pan.
In the UK, the word pancakes refers to the same thing, but the word flapjacks refers to something entirely different: a baked good made from oats, resembling what elsewhere may be called a granola bar or oat bar. The word flapjack is traced back to the late 1500s.
Previously, people referred to them as Indian cakes, hoe cakes, johnnycakes, journey cakes, buckwheat cakes, griddle cakes, and flapjacks. Early American pancakes were made with buckwheat or cornmeal. Thomas Jefferson loved pancakes so much that he sent a special recipe from the White House to his hometown!
Don't be tempted to add more than the recipe suggests, as too much baking powder will make pancakes taste soapy. Alternatively, you could use self-raising flour, which will add to the amount of raising agent in the recipe and potentially make your pancakes fluffier.
Eggs also give the batter additional, richer flavor from the yolk fat. If you add too many eggs, you'll have “pancakes” that look more like custard or crepes. When you don't add enough eggs, the cakes will be drier and tougher.
Pancakes and waffles typically both contain baking soda, which causes them to rise. As soon as the baking soda is combined with the wet ingredients (which contain an acidic ingredient, like often buttermilk), it starts producing carbon dioxide gas bubbles that cause the batter to rise.
Similar to American pancakes, Scotch pancakes (also known as drop scones) are made with flour, eggs, sugar, milk, salt and cream of tartar. They are made much smaller than a typical English pancake and are often served with jam or cream as a snack.
"These are soft pancake-like or crepe-like fare but made larger and more thinly than pancakes. They can be spread with butter and/or jam and they are traditionally rolled up before eating.
The Ancient Greeks made pancakes called τηγανίτης (tēganitēs), ταγηνίτης (tagēnitēs) or ταγηνίας (tagēnias), all words deriving from τάγηνον (tagēnon), "frying pan". The earliest attested references to tagenias are in the works of the 5th-century BC poets Cratinus and Magnes.
And British pancakes are endlessly adaptable. Unlike their puffy, cake-like cousins, there's no sugar in the mix meaning they work for savoury toppings as well as sweet. And yes, I know the Yanks like theirs with bacon alongside the maple syrup, but that's down to an intense sweet-salt obsession.
The main difference is that pancake batter has a raising agent in it, such as baking powder or baking soda, and crepe batter does not. This means that pancakes are thicker and fluffy while crêpes are thin and flat.
A pancake will normally contain a raising agent which makes them rise and is why they are so fluffy whilst the batter for a crepe will tend to be thinner by adding more milk or water to the batter. A Breton galette is like a crepe but is instead savoury and is made using buckwheat.
Introduction: My name is Mr. See Jast, I am a open, jolly, gorgeous, courageous, inexpensive, friendly, homely person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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