Pretend Pyrotechnics

An excessively mild winter followed by even less precipitation than normal and scorching temperatures over the past weeks means that the risk of wildfires is even greater than normal this year. With that in mind, the governor has banned fireworks for this holiday season so that we don’t set the entire state on fire. So in lieu of real fireworks, we created a zero-risk alternative right here at home. While the pancake version might not be as awe inspiring, they were definitely tasty! And there was no risk of flames getting out of control.😉

Hoppy Easter!

I neglected to make green pancakes for St. Patrick’s Day because my mind was on other, far more serious things. And because sometimes a little whimsy brings a smile to my face, I thought some adorable Easter themed pancakes were in order. The fact that they were carrot cake pancakes with cream cheese syrup made it feel just a little bit like I was eating dessert for breakfast, so this meal filled an emotional eating niche as well. And gave us a serving of veggies while filling our bellies. I love it when breakfast is a serious multitasker. 😂

Santa Claus is Coming Around…Again

Sometimes you just have to revisit a classic. And today’s Christmas themed pancakes were exactly that. Strawberries, whipped cream, a few blueberries and banana slices and our breakfast was transformed into the likeness of the jolly old elf himself. Delicious!

Muppet Killer

Having Halloween fall on a Friday is always fun. Because not only is there no school tomorrow and no need to drag sugar coma inflicted children out of bed in order to get them to school (although we really don’t need to do that anymore, which is nice), but it is pancake day! And having time for Halloween pancakes on actual Halloween is great! So, I had a pancake plan, a plan that involved lychee and blueberry eyeballs casually dropped on top of some lime green pancakes all draped with a bloody lychee syrup. It was a good plan, a tasty one, but there was a very unfortunate, and completely unexpected, outcome. When I assembled my first pancake stack, it looked exactly like Kermit the frog. Except bloody. 🤦

Killing Kermit was not exactly on my to-do list for today, but sometimes our days don’t go as expected. 🤣

How You Know Your Ice Cream Cake Isn’t Quite Ready to Cut

Life has been a little crazy around here the last bit. With graduation and all the accompanying activities, ordination and temple days, mission prep, and wedding planning, simplifying where I can is the name of the game. As such, our patriotic offerings were simple this year. Tricolored pancakes and ice cream cake with all American burgers for dinner. Simple. Classic. Go America.

Some Bunny Loves Pancakes!

With Easter just around the corner, it is time for more fun pancakes! Yes, we have been trying to focus more on the Savior and celebrate Easter the way we celebrate Christmas as our church leaders have encouraged us to do, but I still think there is room for all the fun bunny stuff. So today was bunny pancakes! I love carrot cake pancakes in the spring and with some fruit and a bit of cream cheese frosting left over from our cinnamon swirl snowflake pancakes in December (Don’t worry. It has been in the freezer. We did not give ourselves food poisoning this morning.) they were as cute as can be. Matthew had to skip the frosting as it was the real version, but he did add the marshmallow bunny teeth. And as always, he humored me a lot by building the cute food and then letting me take a picture of him. He doesn’t really like the photo portion any more than he did when he was three, but like I said, he humors me!

Life Can Be a Rainbow

St. Patrick’s Day is only a few days away, so this morning’s pancakes were a rainbow-colored ode to the Irish. Matthew and Malia didn’t have school today, so we actually had enough time to do something fun. I can sometimes squeak in fun pancakes for Malia on a Friday morning, but even with late start factored in, Matthew doesn’t usually have time for frivolity on Fridays. So, it was nice to be able to take a little time to play with our food!

Lesson learned-fresh Airheads candy, which is what I used for the rainbows, is much too soft to make an arc. Even when I anchored in the pancakes, and not just the whipped cream. I ended up putting it in the freezer so that it was firm enough to snag a picture before the rainbows wilted. That meant we had to work fast! If I did this again, I would unwrap the candy in advance to let it dry out and harden a bit.

But uncooperative candy aside, it was still a cute breakfast!

I Love Pancakes

I can’t seem to let a major holiday go by without celebrating it in pancakes, so there were Valentine’s Day pancakes this morning. I did simplify though, opting for simple strawberry pancakes tinted red. We had some cream cheese frosting left over from our cinnamon snowflake pancakes at Christmas, so I pulled that out of the freezer to make them a little special. And strawberries lightly shaped with a cookie cutter are fast, easy and add that extra little something. So simple, so tasty, and a fine way to celebrate! 

Pancake Flakes

It wouldn’t be Christmas around here without some themed pancakes. And today all my kids are home, so it seemed like a perfect morning to feed everyone a hearty breakfast. This year I made an experimental creation that was a hodge podge of several different recipes. We ended up with a bit of an indulgent pancake, a cinnamon swirl added to our favorite sour cream pancakes and topped with a cream cheese syrup snowflake. It was a little bit like dessert for breakfast. We don’t do that very often around here, but an occasional splurge meal is fun!

Daniel’s pancakes were the prettiest. Probably because he took his time. Nathan was more concerned with getting some pancakes in his belly, so he only took the time to draw about ¾ a snowflake before he gave up and just tossed the syrup on in a big swirling mass. But aesthetics aside, all the pancakes were absolutely delicious!

Are You My Mummy?

After so many years of making themed pancakes, sometimes it can be a bit difficult to come up with something new. But after scouring Pinterest for something I haven’t done yet and not finding anything that piqued my interest, I had a spark of creativity and came up with my very own idea. Two weeks in Hawaii was not enough to fulfil my craving for tropical flavors, so coconut pancakes and some food coloring combined with homemade coconut syrup thickened enough to be pipeable created this year’s gruesome griddle cakes. (And they weren’t actually all that gruesome, but I love alliteration as much as I love pancakes!

They were some of the tastiest mummies I’ve ever eaten. And yes, I’ve eaten mummies before. On several occasions. All of them being on or around Halloween, of course. 🎃

Tropical Lifestyle

Today was another beach day for my dad, his favorite kind of day around here. He has noticed that he doesn’t actually get much reading done when he is with other folks, but he seems ok with that. 😉 Today Kevin and I and my mom all joined him at the beach and had a nice, relaxing morning. We chatted and watched the waves and the wildlife and generally lazed about which is one of the things vacations is all about. We walked down the beach a bit, dipping our feet in the water and acting as ballast so my mom could do the same. Tucked under some trees with the breeze blowing off the water, it was pleasantly cool and completely enjoyable. 

For lunch, he visited a little spot called Eggs n’ Things, a restaurant that offers brunch items. It is only open for breakfast and lunch and the majority of the menu is composed of traditional breakfast items with an island flare. I enjoyed the perfect trifecta of tropical pancakes-pineapple, coconut and macadamia with real nuts this time! Kevin had the fresh fruit rainbow pancakes, and the tower of whipped cream was just right for him, whose love of enormous amounts of whipped cream is well known, and often joked about, within my own little posse. We both chose fried spam as our protein, something we wouldn’t normally do at home, but which is a must around here! 

It was a slow, calm, laid back kind of a day. And I got to eat pancakes for lunch which always feels like a treat to me!

Bunnies for Breakfast

This past week has been a really hard headache week. That coupled with the fact that my kids had no great desire to color eggs or anything means that Easter festivities around here have been at a bare minimum. And what is that minimum? Pancakes, of course!

I happened across a bunny shaped Peeps pancake pan months ago, about five minutes after Christmas when all the Easter candy showed up in the stores. Our favorite pancake recipe paired with some food coloring led to super simple bunnies for breakfast. At least, they were mostly simple. There was a learning curve with the Peeps pan and we ended up with a roadkill bunny. But Matthew has a tough stomach and ate the roadkill with gusty. And not surprisingly, it tasted just like every other bunny pancake. 😉 Subsequent bunnies were better formed although the dark finish on the pan meant darker color on the pancakes which tended to mask the cute colors. But the pastel insides were cute and delicious!

The very last bunny of the bunch was a technicolor bunny. The last time we had a technicolor bunny at our house was on an off-track craft day in 2010 and was a creation of Matthew’s. That one was cuter than today’s bunny, although the pancake version definitely tasted superior! 

Happy Little Dino-Cakes

A few days ago, Matthew came to me with a pancake proposal. The proposal was as follows: on Wednesday (today) when Matthew had only half a day of school because he would be taking the ACT in the morning, could we make pancakes for lunch. Matthew then proceeded to show me what the proposed pancakes should look like. I responded with a counter proposal: making the afore-mentioned pancakes for dinner so Malia could partake as well. The counter proposal was accepted and thus a plan was born. 

This evening, I was in charge of pancakes and Matthew headed up the decorating committee. The end result was tasty and so, so cute! 

I could not be more pleased that my penchant for fun pancakes has rubbed off on my offspring. 😊

Simply Joyful

In my attempts to simplify my life, which is always an ongoing task for me, I occasionally need to remind myself that simplifying doesn’t mean eliminating everything that is whimsical and fun. For many people, making themed pancakes would be an activity that could easily be tossed out the window. And to be honest, I’ve considered skipping this particular element of our Christmas traditions this year. But thinking about having normal pancakes on Christmas Eve made me sad. Simplifying should bring feelings of relief or calm. If I’m feeling down about my attempts to make things less complicated, that is a sign to me that I’ve trying to cut out something that really matters to me and brings me joy. So, after weeks of vainly attempting to be ok with normal pancakes, I gave in to my inner child and pulled out the food coloring.

This year’s creations were a similitude of what I feel like when pancake art is not a part of my celebrations.

The kiddos, the ones who were at home anyway, were happy to jump on the Grinchy bandwagon. And then Malia branched out and created Kermit. And yes, our creations made me happy!

I’ve Got My Eyes on You! (Version II)

Pancakes! My original fun food medium! It wouldn’t be Halloween without them!

I have an almond poppyseed muffin recipe that uses sour cream (or in our case, fake sour cream). I hadn’t made them for a long while, but at one point last year Malia requested them so I dusted off the recipe and whipped some up. I had forgotten how soft, tender and delicious those little nuggets were and it came as no surprise that thereafter they became one of my family’s most often requested muffin varieties (along with the apple muffins I make that feature loads of shredded apple with just enough batter to hold it all together). After being reminded of the benefits of adding sour cream to quick breads, I went looking for a pancake recipe that incorporated the ingredient. It was a variation that was super easy to find, of course, so I selected a promising one and gave it a whirl. 

With just one sampling, that pancake recipe became my family’s favorite. We eat a lot more pancakes than muffins, especially since the establishment of Pancake Fridays during the Covid shutdown, and this recipe is on the menu more often than any other. As such, it seemed perfectly natural to turn to the greatly loved sour cream pancake recipe when contemplating this year’s Halloween pancake creation. 

Delicious sour cream pancakes were the first perk associated with this morning’s pancake shaped homage to Halloween. The second was the delightful flavor combination of strawberry and kiwi. I’m not always a fan of the artificial versions of this particular duo, but homemade strawberry jam and fresh kiwi are wonderful together! The third perk to this morning’s creations? I got to tell Malia to eat her eyeballs. 😂

Premature Bunnies

With Easter nearly upon us, my mind has turned to fun food. I didn’t have the time or energy to do a whole month’s worth of themed treats this year, but any holiday deserves a themed pancake of some sort. Matthew and Malia are currently out of school for Spring Break, so we jumped the gun just a bit and did your Easter themed breakfast today rather than next week. Doing so meant we had the luxury of more time than we would have on a school day. And we needed a bit more time because crepes take a bit longer to cook since I can only cook two at a time instead of the six standard pancakes I can slap on the griddle all at once. But the cooking was the only part that was time consuming. The creation of the bunnies was fast and simple…and tasty. And of course, once she had created the standard bunny, Malia branched out and created an Easter alien. I think it was just an excuse to use an extra chocolate chip. 😜 But seriously, I love that she will still play with her food. Matthew humors me by following my lead, but Malia still employs her creativity to make her creations all her own.

My Tasty Valentine

Holidays call for fun food, and this year I took another stab at pancake Valentine’s. They were cherry chip pancakes this time, with some additional food coloring to make them nice and red. They were super tasty, a bit decadent with the cream cheese or chocolate glaze, so not your everyday kind of breakfast, but just right for a special occasion. Matthew has kind of outgrown the desire to play with his food so he just ate his pancakes plain and Malia’s pancakes were simply happy to be a part of our meal. Mine were the only ones that were really Valentines, but I’m ok with that. In a few more years, I may be making fun pancakes just for me…