To Seperate The Yolk From The White

So originally the plan was to make Belgian Waffles, buuut that soon turned to shit when my waffle iron decided to sink before it's maiden voyage, so to speak. In short, this dessert turned into a hastily improvised pancake-esque mess. Fuck it, after a few initial test runs, I actually got some pretty good results!

Here's what ya need to prepare dark, bitter, abrasive waffles (or thick as fuck pancakes):

If, unlike me, your waffle iron is fully operational, pre-heat it. Thats the first thing ya want to do.

Lay out 3 seperate mixing bowls, and divide your ingredients thusly: Sift two cupfuls of plain flour into your first bowl, and then add 2 tsps of baking powder, and a pinch or two of salt.
Next bowl: Crack your eggshells, and using your hand to strain the whites, pour them into the bowl, ensuring that the egg yolk stays in the palm of your hand, and the whites slip through the cracks in your fingers.
Third bowl: drop your four yolks into this bowl. Most recipes I consulted for inspiration/ripping-off used either plain or caster sugar. I decided to go for my own personal favourite, dark muscovado. Whichever sugary goodness you go for, dump 2 tbsps of it into your egg YOLK bowl.
Before you go any further, scoop out 4 tbsps of butter, and put them in a FOURTH bowl (this is getting fucking stupid, I know) and stick this bowl in the microwave for a minute or so to melt the butter.

Take your whisk and beat the absolute hell out of your egg yolk/sugar combo until it resembles a disgusting sludgy mess. Add in your hot melted butter, and two mugs worth of milk. Get beating again. The use of muscovado made this a bit... grainier than most recipes will be, so just really stir it up, and use the face of a spoon to crush all the granules down as much as possible.

Once that's done, pour this mixture into your flour/baking powder bowl, and yeah, you guessed it, get back to beating fuck out of it with that whisk.

This is the part I fucked HATE. If you don't have an electric mixer/whisk thingy, don't even bother attempting this next stage, you'll be there for hours. Use your electric mixer to whip up your egg whites into a frothy, meringue-y substance, until it's pretty much white as a ghost, and solid as a rock.

In the recipes I read in cookbooks, and online, they all describe the next stage as 'folding' your whites into the rest of the mixture. I have no fucking clue what that's supposed to mean, so I interpreted it as best I could, and plopped the whites into the mix in stages, using a ladle to cover each scoop of white with the rest of the mix. I literally had no fucking Idea what I was doing, but I kept doing it regardless.

Once all your white mix is enveloped in dark brown muscovadian goodness, light a fire under your frying pan, and splash some oil in there. Obviously if this was an ACTUAL Belgian waffle recipe, you'd simply pour the mixture into your waffle iron. But, y'know...

While your pan is heating, prepare your 'toppings'. I went for a sliiightly-too-expensive vanilla ice cream, dark morello cherries (why the fuck does nowhere have FRESH cherries this time of year? fuck supermarkets) and dark, slightly bitter, Swiss cooking chocolate. Break off about half the bar of choc, pop it in a bowl and microwave it for 2 minutes until it melts into utter fucking foodporn heaven.

Leave your chocolate to the side for now, and either check on your waffles, or pour your batter into the frying pan. Give it just a minute or so on a high heat for either side, you don't want the batter burning or going flat. Flip it out of the pan (onto the floor on your first attempt if you're me. the ten-second-rule applies here). Apply your toppings in a suitably pretentious fashion, et voila!

If you're surprised by how good this actually tastes, then you'll think you can handle a second portion. Believe me, you can't. Didn't stop me from pushing my ironclad (Steff! I got to use it in a sentence! yesss) stomach to it's absolute limit.

The obligatory, VERY loosely connected to the title/dessert theme, clip that follows features the almighty Jeff Walker. If you don't know what band he fronted, jump off a tall building.

South Of No North Pancakes

For once I couldn't come up with even a bad music pun for a post title, but then I got to thinking about what the actual ingredients were for this little bit of alchoholic alchemy and came up with a suitably pretentious literary-inspired title instead.

Basically, all I did was make standard pancakes (or 'dropped scones' as my weird Northern 1950's bakery book calls 'em), with a couple of little twists. The main attraction for me was the syrup, but we'll get to that in a bit. First, here's the obligatory ingredients shot:

Firstly I'd like to point out that YES, Southern Comfort is ENTIRELY necessary when making pancakes, or at least when I make 'em anyway. Also, I was ill and tired as fuck when I put that shot together, so yeah, I'm missing... well a lot of the ingredients I actually used. Bite me.

The first thing you wanna do is measure out around 5 ozs (I know, ounces, what the fuck right? blame the ancient recipe book) of plain flour, and also around half an ounce of butter. If you're as fucking weird as me and you can't touch flour because for some reason it creeps you the fuck out, get someone else to knead the butter and flour together, so it all breaks up into disgusting flour-y disgustingness.
Then you want to crack a couple of eggs into a pyrex bowl, and get stirrin'! Add in the occasional splash of milk as you stir, just to thin out the consistency, unless (again) you're like me and like a reeeally thick goopy mixture.

This is the point where you can deviate from most standard recipes and get a little bit creative with ingredients. Not that I did anything batshit crazy like add crack cocaine or centipede legs, I stuck to pretty safe choices like demerara sugar, ground ginger and cinnamon. Mix your flour mixture together with your egg/milk mixture, and chuck in all your sugar or whatever. Whisk the hell outta all of that, and leave it to sit in a bowl in the fridge for about 20 minutes. I don't know why you gotta do that, but the recipe told me to.

While that's pointlessly chilling, you can get to the REAL reason this dessert is so damn fun.
First get yourself a mini-cauldron, and add in COPIOUS amounts of Southern Comfort, then pour in about the same amount of real Canadian maple syrup. Seriously, you want to make this about half and half, for maximum boozey goodness.

It might not look like a lot in the photo above, but when you're only serving one, trust me, it's more than enough! Remove your pancake mix from the fridge, and for the sheer hell of it, splash in a little more Southern Comfort, because clearly your throat doesn't hurt enough.

Fire up your frying pan on a pretty high heat, and slooowly pour in a good helping of your mixture. It should only take a minute before you start too see bubbles form, so if you're skilled enough, try and flip your pancake when you see the first bubbles. If you time it right, you'll get pancakes that are a fucking beautiful golden colour. Basically just repeat this as many times as it takes until you've used all your pancake batter, I managed to get 4 decent sized pancakes, but if you wanna make 'em even bigger, you could settle for 2 HUGE pancakes. Anyway, enough horseshit, top your stack off with a chunk of butter, and then drown em in Southern Syrup.

Et voila, the ideal drunken breakfast!