Shrove Tuesday is a very handy holy day for baking bloggers – while regular food bloggers can always regale us with stories of what they ate for dinner last night, bakers can’t really do the same. Not unless they make and eat a different dessert every single evening. Ugh.
Shrove Tuesday provides us with a chance, for once, to blog about dinner! (Remember, I consider anything sweet and produced in a pan to be ‘stovetop baking’. So it totally counts.)
I can’t remember how often we ate pancakes on Shrove Tuesday when I was a kid, but as an adult, I like to make them every year. I mean, is there anyone who doesn’t like breakfast for dinner?
You can find more recipes at barbara-luijckx.com
In order to provide fresh blog fodder, I decided to make my favourite ricotta version instead of my standard pancakes. The recipe actually calls them ‘griddle cakes’ but for some reason I find that term to be vaguely American and rather foreign to me. (Can anyone confirm that, by the way?) To me they’re plain old pancakes. Just really, really good ones.
Ricotta Pancakes
From Real Family Food by Antony Worrall Thompson
Serves 4-5
325g (11 1/2oz) ricotta cheese
175ml (6 fl oz) milk
1 tablespoon honey
4 eggs, separated
225g (8oz) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
large pinch of salt
2 tablespoons granulated or caster sugar
vegetable oil or melted butter to coat pan
Combine first three ingredients with egg yolks and beat until smooth. Keep egg whites for later. Combine flour and baking powder with a pinch of salt, sift into the ricotta mixture and fold together to combine.
With an electric or stand mixer, beat the egg whites to soft peaks, then add the sugar and beat until it holds stiff peaks. Fold the egg whites gently into the ricotta mixture, incorporating most of it but being careful not to overmix.
Lightly oil or butter a non-stick frying pan. Add a large, heaped tablespoon of batter to pan for each pancake, and cook over medium heat for about two minutes. Flip and cook until golden. Keep warm in the oven while cooking the rest of the batches.