Flipping pancakes on an open fire is stacks of fun, and both grown-ups and kids alike get excited about the prospect of drowning breakfast in syrup.
While you can pick up a shaker bottle of pancake mix easily enough at the shops, packing up your own dry ingredients before hitting the road is easy, cheap, and you can cater quantities exactly to your needs. You also don’t have to eat a whole bunch of stabilisers and anticaking agents. Mmmm, e-numbers…
Here’s the basic recipe for your pre-prepped pancake mix:
• 1 cup self-raising flour
• 1/4 cup dry milk powder
• 1 tsp. of baking powder (can be omitted but gives extra fluffy pancakes)
Before you leave home, tip all of these ingredients into a ziplock bag and squeeze out all of the excess air before sealing. This recipe can easily be doubled, tripled or multiplied to the power of 9 if needed for crowd-feeding.
You can also make up a few bags to take with you to tide you through lunches and dinners as well, because let's face it – pancakes is an anytime of day meal.
Once you reach the campsite, you will need a few wet ingredients to bring your pancakes to fruition.
• 3/4 cup – 1 cup of water (depending on how thick you like your breakfast discs)
• 1 large egg
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• (extra olive oil to cook with)
For pancakes fluffier than a cloud in the shape of a poodle, mix your wet ingredients together first and whisk them good. This folds in air pockets to the eggs. Afterwards, gently stir in the dry ingredients so as not to bust the bubbles you’ve just created.
If a fluffy pancake isn’t your jam, you can also mix up both wet and dry ingredients into ziplock bags before you leave home, and store in a cool area (like a fridge). When you’re ready to nom, simply snip off a corner of bag to pipe out the mixture onto a frypan.
Alternatively, you can pour the pre-made batter into squeezy sauce bottles to tip straight onto the pan.
Once you have your final batter ready to go, scoop, pipe or pour your desired pancake shape onto your hot frypan and wait until some bubbles start to appear. Once you see these signs of cooking magic happening, flip your pancake over and let the other side fry for about a minute.
Repeat. Often.
To jazz up this monotonous part of pancake-formation, you also have options when it comes to pancake size.
Tiny, itty-bitty, baby pancakes are perfect for little hands, or you can make giant pancakes as big as the whole pan to slice up like a cake. Pro tip: you may need two flipping devices to turn a full-pan pancake over.
Once you have your pancake stack, let the kids loose on toppings. Think chopped fruit, jam, honey, syrup, whipped cream, bacon, or even just lashings of butter.
There is no wrong option when it comes to pancakes.