Pikelets

I remember my dad making pikelets for us when I was younger (I don't remember my mum making pikelets, but I think she made just about everything else!). I can only seem to remember having them when it was rainy, and I remember eating them COVERED in sugar.

I had a recipe for baby pikelets that I thought would make a nice change from the usual breakfasts she's been having, and something special for a weekend. The recipe came from one of the mothers in my mothers group who stayed in QEII for a few nights before her baby was 6 months old, and was a bit taken aback to have the nurses offer her baby cakes and muffins and other grown up things (the nurses said that the second most common reason they have babies come in with them was because of eating issues, when they babies haven't been introduced to solids early enough).

Pikelets/pancakes and I have a checkered past - I have ruined more of them than I have successfully made. A lot of my problems might have come from the fact that my 'easy' six ingredient recipe made way too many, so I would halve the recipe as I went and always get something wrong. Or I would have the pan too hot to start with. Or too cold and it would take forever and then I'd turn it up and it would burn. Or it would stick to the pan. Or it would stick to itself when I tried to flip it.

These pikelets were doomed from the start.

The recipe had like 8 ingredients, and I had no baking powder, so I used bicarb (are they the same?!) and our flour container isn't marked, so I'm not sure if I used plain flour or self raising.

The batter was too thin for the first four, so I added more flour.

Then the husband came out to see why I'd taken half an hour to get her breakfast and indcated I needed to put the pan on the hotter hotplate (counter intuitive to me - see my point about burning everything all the time). The next four were great. The next four burnt. The four after that burnt. Then two of the four after that burnt. Then I was out of batter.

So I sad down with the baby and gave her one to chew on - she thought it was okay, but dropped half of it on the floor. And did the same with the second. And did the same with the third. Then wouldn't touch them anymore.

The husband came back out after his shower to check them out, as I'd told him he'd be eating them for breakfast too (the baby didn't need 20 pikelets for breakfast). But then he saw the plate of burnt pancakes. And he saw how rubbery they looked. And he saw me offering one to the baby and she would turn her head every which way to avoid having it in her mouth.

So I gave her some cottage cheese on toast - little soldiers scattered on her highchair. And in the middle of it,  of all of the little pieces of it scattered across her highchair, she picked up a random scrap of pikelet, screwed up her face and spat it out.

Harsh critic.