Saturday, October 27, 2007

The look of embarrassment, the taste of failure

What the fuck is this???



They were supposed to be pancakes. Noticing that I happened to have all the ingredients for pancakes sitting around doing nothing particularly useful this morning, and since I was eager to find an excuse to drag my feet on running my errands today, I decided to try something different. Specifically, vegan pancakes was what I was going for. No eggs, no milk, just the following that I found on some Australian vegan forum, which I will not link to due to the shameful photographic evidence above:

2½ cups flour
¼ cup sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

whisk together:
1 cup soymilk
1½ cup water
¼ cup oil


"Tip wet ing. into dry ones. Fold together until only just combined. The batter should be quite lumpy, which makes the pancakes light. If you beat the batter smooth, the pancakes will be tough."

I cut the recipe in half, and even at that, the batter was far too watery. Rather than add more flour, I decided to just see what would happen when I poured it into my frying pan. First "cake" stuck to my pan, which was the pan's fault. It tends to like its contents far too much to let them go, no matter what the temperature. Second one did the same, and the watery mess wasn't helping.

Finally, I became frustrated enough to pour all the rest of the batter into the pan and just let it cook as one big cake. This actually worked much better. Problem was, it never did gain that "cakey" consistency. Rather, it ended up somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between cake and gel. It actually tasted alright, but pancakes they were not.

Ironically, these egg-less, vegan pancakes came out far heavier than any real pancake I've ever had, and they're sitting in my stomach like grease-drenched Dunkin' Donuts chased with a 32-ounce ice cream shake.

Never again!

2 comments:

funcrunch said...

Oh, that looks horrible. Please don't let that throw you off of future vegan pancake attempts; Ziggy and I have at least two good recipes we'd be happy to share. :-)

harmolodic said...

I'd be up for a tutorial! Ziggy definitely has the vegan cooking thing down.