pancake weekends

We are totally missing out on a cottage weekend in Grand Bend right now. Nuno's busy with storyboard work so we had to stay home. We were planning on making a great brunch for everyone which included Montreal bagels, Jimmy Dean sausages and wild blueberry buttermilk pancakes (using our cottage blueberries from the other week). To help ease the pain of not being able to enjoy this weekend like we had hoped I made the wild blueberry buttermilk pancakes for just the 3 of us. I used this recipe I blogged about before and they turned out perfect. Then I got so sad thinking of the cottage a wave of inspiration fell on me to make Smores pancakes. 

I took half the pancake batter and added graham cracker crumbs. Then dropped several chocolate chips to the pancakes as they were grilling. A final dollop of marshmallow Fluff and here are our Smores Griddlecakes!!

I kid you not, this is a keeper. They turned out absolutely fantastic and I have a feeling we'll be making these down the road for overnight guests. The pancakes fluffed up and stayed light with the addition of the graham crackers, but they certainly didn't seem like pancakes anymore. We're calling them griddle cakes but they work as a dessert similar to a Whoopie Pie. My gosh, they are good. Eating these takes some of the sting away from not being on the beach right now.

blueberry-buttermilk pancakes

Last week I made a couple recipes that required a carton of buttermilk. If you keep up with my blog you'd know how much I hate seeing food go to waste so I've been attempting to use up what I can from this carton. Sunday morning I decided to try out this Blueberry-Buttermilk Pancake recipe from Everyday Food's October 2009 issue. This batter is extremely easy to work with and I decided to make many small baby cakes, most no bigger than a mason jar lid. The recipe is actually quite versatile because the name suggests blueberries are in the batter but you are actually instructed to add them after you form the cakes on your grill.

That left tons of room to play! I used up some of the blueberries we froze in July along with slices of banana and chocolate chips. Very customize-able and perfect for make-your-own-pancake parties. Plus this batter seemed to be very fool-proof and made beautiful cakes!

Now, since there was a relatively small amount of sugar in this recipe, I was comfortable having Owen eat pancakes with us. And he went nuts! As the pancake eating went down, the messier and blue-er Owen became.

He munched on without a care in the world and then enjoyed a leisurely Sunday morning soak in the bath followed by a morning nap. I don't think he could have had a better Sunday morning.