New things, including magic pancakes

The most recent issue of Cooking Light has a really great strawberry layer cake recipe in it that I wanted to make for Mother’s Day.  The problem was that I wanted to try some of it to make sure it turned out okay AND I wanted to give some to my parents while bringing most of it to the hubby’s parents’ house.  Sure, it can be really cute to wrap up an individual cake slice for someone, but that wasn’t my goal this time around.  “Oh, hi, yes, I brought you 3/4 of a cake because I also wanted to give some to someone else.”  So, instead, I decided to make the cake as cupcakes.  They turned out quite delicious, but I think I made two key errors: 1) I did not let the butter reach room temperature and 2) I over beat the batter (I always over beat the batter, darn it – trying to work on that).  Because of this, they collapsed a little and weren’t as fluffy as I’d like.  They were still delicious, though.  (Note: I substituted 1 tsp. vanilla for the Grand Marnier that the recipe calls for.  I really wanted the strawberry taste to stand out and not be in conflict with any orange tones.)

So, the cake recipe calls for 1 cup of reduced-fat buttermilk and since I can only ever find buttermilk in quarts, I had 3 cups left over.  I woke up Sunday morning wondering what I should do with it since 1 – neither the hubby nor I drink buttermilk and 2 – we’re going to Florida on Friday for four days and I really didn’t want it sitting around.  And then it hit me:

Buttermilk pancakes!  Yum!

Ordinarily, I don’t/can’t really eat pancakes.  I certainly never order them when we eat out because it just won’t end well.  Pancakes are high in carbs and low on protein, which is not a good combination for me.  Plus, it’s extremely rare to find a restaurant with sugar-free syrup.  Regular syrup – even good, organic syrup – does a number on me because the sugar content is so high, and what good are pancakes without syrup?

However, if I was making pancakes at home, I could use my own sugar-free syrup and also eat something else to go with them (cheese, fruit) to balance out the supreme carb-ness.  And ironically, since it was Mother’s Day, I was able to use two great appliances that are recent gifts from our mothers.  The hubby’s mother gave us an electric griddle a little while back and my parents just gave us a microwave this weekend (as a gift for our six month anniversary, which is this upcoming Friday, aww).  I used the microwave to melt the butter and the griddle to make the pancakes.

I’d never made pancakes from scratch before, so I was a bit nervous, but they turned out to be really delicious!  For once, I tried a Smitten Kitchen recipe and didn’t royally screw it up!  Her skills are so more advanced than mine; I can’t even properly whip egg whites yet – but I’ll get there.  For Sunday, I made her Buttermilk Pancakes, but sans blueberries since 1) I didn’t have any, 2) the hubby doesn’t like them, and 3) they would have upped the sugar level (yes, even natural sugar can become too much of a good thing).  They were perfect, though – golden on the outside, crispy around the edges, and fluffy in the middle.  Mmm, it is seriously going to be way too tempting to make those more often.  And, somehow, they didn’t upset my sugar level.  How is that possible?  They’re magic, that’s how.