Love You Pancakes for my boy on his birthday

Today is John's 4th birthday!  The kid loves pancakes and I promised that we'd make a batch to start his day off right.  I had some leftover buttermilk and flipped around my cookbooks quickly to find a good recipe.  The single girl cookbook came to the rescue again.  Its slightly odd that I keep making these potential "morning after" recipes for my kid, but they always sound easy and promising.  I got the dry ingredients together the night before, knowing that John would be up bright and early and ready to great the day with high levels of energy.  I mixed up 2 cups of flour, 1 Tbsp of sugar, 1/4 tsp of salt, and 1 Tbsp of baking soda.  Unfortunately, the recipe first says to use 1 Tbsp of baking powder unless you're using buttermilk- then you use baking soda and only 1/2 tsp.  Of course, I read that part after I added 1 Tbsp of baking soda already.  This is one of my peeves with baking.  If I were cooking I could simply skim out the extra ingredient or add a touch more of everything else to balance it.  But baking is chemistry, not art, and exact measurements are a necessity.  So, I chucked the batch and started again. 

John was up at 7am on the dot and immediately started asking for his pancakes.  We washed our hands, pulled up his step stool, and got started.  I cracked the first egg and John begged to do one.  I tried to help, but it was a bit of a mess.  We were able to salvage it, but had some egg on both of our hands.  Yuck!  As some of you may know, eggs are my least favorite food.  I don't mind it in baked goods, but the raw stuff still skeeves me out a bit.  We added 1 1/2 cups of buttermilk, stirred, and combined it with the flour mixture. It was pretty thick.  The recipe said that you could add a little more milk, but not buttermilk, to thin it out which I did.  Then I let it sit the suggested 10 minutes before cooking. 

The recipe also called for the skillet to be moderately low, which seemed odd to me.  I wouldn't have normally followed this step on my own but in my attempt to follow the recipe for blogging and learning purposes, I went with it.  I kept my double burner skillet (love that thing) over moderate heat for about 3 minutes and then added a few touches of butter in the spots where I would be cooking.  The recipe suggested hockey puck sized pancakes, and they were stille pretty thick when I put them on the stove.  They took way longer than usual to get bubbles on them, and even longer for those bubbles to pop.  For anyone whos never made pancakes- that's usually the key.  Once the bubbles pop you can flip the pancakes and finish up the other side.  These pancakes, when all was said and done, were about an inch thick.  I knew I had cooked them enough, but I was worried.  I was right to be worried.  They were pretty terrible.  The flavor was good, but they were really rubbery and tough.  I ate one, and so did John, and I chucked the rest.  I'll stick to regular pancakes next time and save my buttermilk for biscuits. 

On a positive note, I did change up my method for cooking bacon after a tip was given to me earlier in the week.  I put the raw, thick-cut bacon on a baking sheet (not a cookie sheet for obvious reasons) and placed it in the oven at 350 for 40 minutes.  I'll never make bacon on the stove again!  It cooked it all up at once with little mess.  And the bacon was fantastic!  Crisp and delicious.  Shame on me, too, because I've watched every kitchen that I've ever worked in use this exact method and it never occurred to me to do it at home.  It took longer than normal, but I didn't have to worry about batches and it cooked while I made everything else.  As far as timing goes, it was pretty spot on. 

So there you have it folks.   Not so delicious pancakes but a solid tip for bacon.  I'd leave you with the recipe, but I'd have to type out the whole thing and who would really want a not so good pancake recipe anyway?