Traditional Scottish pancake recipe

As a wee weekend treat, I like to make pancakes for breakfast and wake kate up with a big plate of pancakes, egg and sausage and a cup of coffee.

We’ve been doing this for a few months and even created a youtube video showing you how to do this but only just realised that we forgot to share the recipe here on the blog. So apologise folks, here it is.

Big, fluffy pancakes to make you smile

A bit like morning rolls, pancakes are another one of those foods which cause a little bit of controversy here in the UK.  Why? Well simply because depending on where you are, when you order pancakes, it’s a bit like roulette waiting to see what you get.

Here in Scotland, pancakes are fluffy, thick and delicious. Much like the American pancake although we tend to eat them cold, smothered in butter with a cup of tea. Down south, they would call this a drop scone, not a pancake. In England (down south) they tend to eat thin french crepes style ones and call them pancakes.

So today’s recipe is for Scottish pancakes – please don’t say scotch, it hurts my ears and annoys me greatly. There is no such thing as scotch (unless you count what Americans call whisky), it’s Scots or Scottish. 😃

Ingredients for 8 big pancakes

• 270 grams of plain flour
• 2 teaspoons of baking powder
• 2 teaspoons of melted butter, allow it to cool slightly
• half a teaspoon of salt
• 4 tablespoons of sugar, just normal granulated sugar will do
• two beaten eggs and
• 260 ml of milk

Get to making your pancakes

Firstly,  add all the dry ingredients to a bowl and give it a mix, then add the wet ingredients to another bowl and mix well. Now combine the wet into the dry, mixing to form a thick batter.
There, that’s it. Easy huh?

Well, you still have to cook them…

Get a non-stick frying pan nice and hot. You don’t want it too hot because then the pancakes can burn. So keep it on a nice medium heat, you want the pancakes to spend enough time in the pan so that the insides cook not just the outsides.

This recipe will give probably about eight, kind of average-sized thick, fluffy pancakes.  I just find my big kitchen spoon is just the perfect amount for that so basically I use that as my batter to pan transference device.

Once the pan is hot, spoon some batter into it, enough to make a pancake the size you want. I’d say a nice big dollop but more importantly, I say – once it’s in the pan, leave it alone. Don’t fiddle with it. That’s very important! Let it sit in the pan and what you’re watching for the little bubbles repeatedly busting through the batter.

Once you have little bubbles all over it, you can turn it over and give it 30 seconds or so to brown on the other side. The little bubbles are how you know it’s cooked and it’s ok to flip it.

Watch our video to see what we mean.

It really is that simple and in less than 20 minutes you will have a big stack of lovely pancakes to share for a weekend breakfast.