Slightly Classy Pancakes

By Caroline Clough in Food on Jan 31, 2007 7:24PM

Mmm, breakfast, what a great idea. When Chicagoist was growing up we made pancakes or biscuits almost every Saturday. We played around a fair amount with the ratios and ingredients of our batter; sometimes we would have green pancakes (not so good), other times we put the maple syrup right in the batter (really excellent). You name an ingredient, and there's a good possibility that we threw it into batter at least once (OK, not any ingredient). This weekend we made white chocolate chip pancakes, and they're a great beginning pancake. If you have kids, or are still a kid (at heart), then you should make this recipe for a special Saturday (or Sunday, though we think Sundays are truly for dim sum) breakfast.

Pancakes are pretty straightforward. We bet you already have all the ingredients you need, perhaps with the exception of the white chocolate chips.

What You Need:

2 cups flour
1 1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cup milk
3/4 cup white chocolate chips, plus extra for garnish
a bit of butter for greasing the skillet
1 skillet
1 spatula
1 small ladle or 1 large spoon

What You Do:

1. Heat up your skillet after greasing it with butter (you could use oil instead). It should be hot enough that water sizzles but not so hot that the butter starts smoking.

2. In a small bowl, whisk the eggs and milk together.

3. In another, larger bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together.

4. Slowly add the milk/egg mixture to the dry ingredients. Do this in increments to lower your lump factor.

5. Add the white chocolate chips. Stir until most lumps are gone.

6. Check your skillet's readiness, then pancake away. We made rather large pancakes, probably half a cup of batter per pancake. But you can easily gauge what size pancake you want as you go along. Flip your pancake when you see a number of bubbles on its exposed side.

7. Make sure that your skillet continues to be greased. This may mean the occasional extra pat of butter or pour of oil between cakes. Lower the heat if your pancakes are burning.

If you're serving a number of people you can put your cooked pancakes on an oven-safe plate and stick it in the oven at a low temperature until you're ready. Sprinkle each plate with white chocolate chips, they'll melt slightly and, believe us, that's going to rock your world. We think maple syrup isn't necessary, but it wouldn't hurt. We also toyed with the idea of blueberries as an extra special touch, perhaps you can do what we didn't.

Enjoy and happy breakfast!