Pikelets

It’s been one of those weeks.

You know the ones – where you are so busy you feel as if you have no time to breathe, let alone cook, clean, exercise or get anything remotely important done. Fortunately the week fell at a good time – all of my current assessment is completed. I had to work 18 hours, including over this Easter weekend. As a casual, this is too many hours for me to handle, especially as I rely on public transport and that means that today and tomorrow my travel hours are super long.

I am going to visit my grandparents tomorrow and Sunday, which should be nice. Then, when I return I have two busy days of work and uni assessment before my Mum arrives for three days – which I seriously cannot wait for. I don’t even feel like I am getting an Easter ‘holiday’ – it’s like a break to study, not vacation.

So this week I barely exercised. I did not eat well. I ate a lot of carbs. Particularly of the bread kind. What can I say – I was stressed.

Yesterday one of my tutes was cancelled so I had a massive four/five hour break between classes, and then work until 11 that night. I decided to skip my lecture at four and relax at home for a bit. Now I say that like I always skip lectures – as if I am cooler than I am. I hate skipping lectures. I get all sweaty and nervous thinking about it. And I am going to listen to this one when they upload the audio online anyway. I am not cool.

So while I was watching Happy Endings and drooling over food blogs, I decided to make these pikelets. I had intended to make them for breakfast today, as a treat for Easter, but I wanted to pretty much just do schoolwork today and didn’t want to cook. So I decided to make them early. This recipe is my mother’s, and it is brilliant. I have these memories of spending all day in the pool with my next door neighbours (who are pretty much brother and sister to me and my brother) and then Mum would make us these for lunch sometimes. We would drench them in peanut butter, maple syrup, apricot jam – whatever we wanted. It is one of my favourite childhood memories.

My other favourite childhood memory is of me and my best friend (the girl next door neighbour, her name is A) convincing my brother (S) and her brother (W) to come picnicking in the backyard with us. These pikelets were pretty much all we ate.

The recipe is simple, versatile and is automatically portioned controlled (if you can stick to just a few of these, you won’t totally hate yourself – and it is easier to convince yourself you have eaten enough, because you will have eaten four, not just one big pancake, for example).They're actually not all that bad for you, and if you are looking for a treat breakfast, this is a relatively good one to splurge on.

Level of Difficulty: So insanely easy.

Average Cost: $

Main Ingredients: Sugar and flour

Occasion: Breakfast, but warmed up they make an amazing snack throughout the day. Even cold they are a nice snack.

Menu Options: I pretty much smother mine in pure maple syrup. If I’m binging on them, I’ll have some with syrup and the rest with apricot jam, but really, like pancakes, anything goes.

Makes 12 or 13, depending on the size of the pikelets.  

You will need:

1 egg

½ cup low fat milk

2 teaspoons butter

1 cup self raising / all purpose flour

Salt (pinch - 1/2 teaspon)

3 tablespoons sugar

What to do:

Whisk the egg, sugar and half of the milk in a large bowl. It was make a golden/orange liquid.

Sift the flour and salt into the mixture. Mix well, adding the remainder of the milk until the batter is the consistency of thick cream. You may need to add extra milk – this is up to you. The batter should be pretty thick, but rather smooth. I mixed by hand, but a mixer won’t harm the recipe.

Melt the butter and add it to the mixture. I used a handheld beater here, just because I was lazy, but you can mix the mixture by hand. Make sure the butter is completely added and the mixture is very smooth and slightly thinner. The mixture should still be thick though.

Preheat and grease a frypan – I use coconut oil to grease, purely because I like the flavour.

Using a large spoon, scoop a spoonful of the mixture onto a frypan. If the heat is high, this won’t take very long. When the surface of the mixture is bubbly, turn the pikelet over to cook the other side.

Repeat this step to make 12 pikelets.

Remove from heat when cooked and serve immediately. It won’t take too long to cook – my heat was very high and it took about 2 minutes on each side. Be careful when flipping the pikelets, the mixture will already be mostly cooked and you don’t want to leave it on the heat for too long or it will burn.

I also want to mention how awesome my two roommates (Y and M) are. I told them about how I always celebrated Easter on Friday, not Sunday, because my parents always worked Sunday. And this year I was going to be all alone for Easter Friday. Both Y and M have gone home to their families for the holidays, and Y left early this morning. So when I woke up, there was the most adorable little Easter basket of goodies at my door. It was such an amazing surprise – especially as it was full of dark chocolate, which is a total weakness for me. So you guys, if you’re reading this, you are the best roommates a girl could ask for!