Sunday 20 March 2011

Happy pancake day... sort of.

Today, myself and two lovely lady friends of mine decided to celebrate Pancake day. We had had plans for this to happen on the actual day but we are a little rubbish with time keeping so it took us a while to actually get this day organised!

I offered to host the wonderful day out given that it would mean I could earn a few more gold stars on my 'Independent woman' chart. I had a sneaky suspicion that I would take to this with an array of professionalism. I just felt like this could be one of those things that I would be naturally good at. I mean, I now own a kitchen, I should be pretty darn amazing in it right?

Now I have never made a pancake before, (we have always been fans of the 'Aunt Bessie's ready made pancakes' in my family) but Jenny and Anna apparently seemed to be experts who did this every year. This was exciting, how could we fail such an epic challenge?

With this in mind, myself, Jenny and Anna took to my kitchen armed with forks, bowls and wooden spoons.



We cheated a little as we already had the pancake mix and only needed to add egg and water but it's barely a cheat so it's fine. In my excitement of being a real life independent cook, I practically threw the water into the bowl, pouring all of it in at once. Apparently this wasn't a good thing as you are meant to add the water gradually. I did start to fear for our future pancakes when the mixture after ten minutes of whisking still looked like this.



I learnt something about my friend Anna during this experience. When she is hungry, she is not a patient lady. She had decided after only 5 minutes that lumpy pancakes would probably taste just as good as smooth ones and that the mixture should be fine. Luckily we managed to convince her otherwise and after the three of us attacking the mixture with our forks simultaneously, we managed to salvage the mixture from the brink and turn it into a rather sexy looking texture.



The day took a turn for the competitive after this as Anna had the ingenious idea of each of us doing a pancake and seeing which one was better. So after a quick Frube for each of us we got ready.



Jenny went first.



Everything was fine to start with until the time came for her to flip the pancake. Due to the mix not wanting to be separated from the pan (I guess they'd formed a bond in the short time they'd known each other), Jenny had to resort to more of a rolling exercise rather than a flipping exercise.



I smiled smugly at this because the word competition had been used and I was no longer 'friend Lisa' but 'competitor Lisa' and unfortunately 'competitor Lisa' isn't very nice. Miraculously and by some sort of genius on her side she managed to rescue the pancake from the brink of extinction and return it to some form of normalcy again.



However, in her overzealous state of thinking she was capable of performing the same miracle again, she destroyed the pancake in it's last couple of minutes in the pan and was left to make do with what she had. In fairness to her, she didn't do a bad job!




Next it was my turn and to say I was excited would be a little bit of an understatement.



I just knew I would be good at this and now that Jenny's hadn't turned out that great I had everything to play for. I was going to win this, if it was the last thing I did! ... I think Jenny may have suspected my untapped talent for she kept a close eye on me throughout the whole experience.



If you were to describe the beginning parts of this cooking extravaganza as a success and something that by far exceeded anyone else then you would be correct. The pancake was perfect, it was round and even and UNBELIEVABLY sexy.



But then, well I'll let the pictures tell the story.










This was not supposed to happen. This was meant to be my time!! MY TIME!! How could something that I was quite obviously BORN to do, turn out to go so hideously wrong? I was devastated, I was a shell of my normal self. I was a broken woman and it was all the stupid pancake's fault.

Whilst I cried silently into my tuna filling I had prepared earlier but now had nothing to fill it with, Jenny was in the denial stage of her own personal journey. I think she managed to blame every kind of cooking utensil there was in the room, from the pan not being 'non-stick' enough to the ready made mix being a faulty pack. She was moments away from blaming the air in the kitchen and how it was probably somehow toxic when Anna's impatience could be held in no longer. It was her turn and she was going to make something that she could eat!!



She poured the batter in, although by this point both myself and Jenny were so deflated by the whole experience we could barely watch to see another friend go down in the same painful situation.

But then.



She had gone against the grain. She had made something that none of us had thought possible... She was sodding winning!!



We were not impressed.



Thank goodness that Anna loves a good photo as much as me. In her hastiness to get a shot of her in mid flip as she flipped her pancakes she kind of got a little crazy with the pan and couldn't quite control the pancake inside. What we got as a result was half her pancake behind the cooker whilst the other flew in the air in the shape of a mini chicken.



The end.

6 comments:

  1. haha! love your little photo-story; especially the bin one at the end!

    I had pancakes today too... I would have won your competition. Emphatically.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well...

    I was going to argue this but yeah. Pretty much anyone in the entire history of the world would have made better pancakes than we did on this day.

    Rather bizarre you were also making pancakes on the same day. Perhaps we have created a new pancake day?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pancake day 2: Return of the Pancakes.
    (nearly my facebook status that day, but then Jurassic Park 3 came on)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lol. Pancake Day 2 would make an amazing film actually. Especially as everyone would be looking for Pancake Day 1, only they'll never find it because it doesn't exist...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think I can now comment on this if I have worked out the correct way to do this.
    Just want to say, you may not have been in the kitchen at the time, but you did always get the pancakes from scratch.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well I specifically remember seeing an Aunty Bessie's box propped up somewhere in the kitchen...

    ReplyDelete