How I made pancakes

In my brainstorm for multiples to make my pump replica out of, I remembered when I made the stuffed replica Molly asked me if I had considered making it with stacked units like pancakes. So I thought that would be a good multiple.

KG told me a little bit about how Polish pancakes are super puffy which would be ideal for animating the pump.

Here’s a recipe I looked at:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/German-Skillet-Baked-Pancakes-358323

So, I started by cracking 8 eggs, putting the egg whites in the blender and the egg yolks in a bowl. Then I tried liquefying, whipping, pureeing the egg whites. It seamed to not work very well. While I did that, I poured a cup of flower, and cup of half and half in with the yolks. When I gave up and poured them into a bowl, I noticed that there was a whole inch thick layer of eggwhite foam sitting on top of a bunch of liquid eggwhite. So I mixed the yolk, flour, half and half mixture in the blender, added ¼ cup of flour and blended more, poured it back into it’s own bowl, and. Then I rinsed out the blender, poured the liquid egg white into blender and pureed it a little. I rushed it a little bit because the butter was already melting in the pan. Then I tried to fold the eggwhites into the other batter, but it was really runny batter so it wasn’t super foldy, although the foam seemed to make a bunch of floaty lumps in the batter. So Then I poured a bunch into the giant pan and turned the heat way up. It rose a little. I decide to add a tsp baking powder to the rest of the batter which I decided was stupid because I couldn’t mix it in properly without over mixing the folded eggwhites, so I tried to distribute the baking powder a little more, but really not that much. The baking soda made the pancakes blow big giant balloons which slowly deflated when taken off the heat. It was cool that when I flipped the pancakes over and pressed them down with the spatula, they made a little sound that actually sounded like the pump. They all ended up burnt and all over the place.

I planned to use pam instead of butter next time so it would be even and I planned to whip the eggs in smaller amounts at a time so that they would all get whipped.

I tried to bake them like the epicurious recipe said and I thought I would use tinfoil stencils to get the range of sizes. It did not work. I had changed my recipe so that it was mostly eggs so it was very runny. They flooded out of the stencils ad they did not rise at all, and they burnt.

So I added a bunch of flour until they were much thicker because I remembered that when I made pancakes thicker, they were like big fluffy bricks (because there are so many fluffy bricks) and when I made the pancakes more viscous, they just spread as thin as they can and they don’t really rise. I also decided to try frying them again using pam. They worked out ok. At first I would flip them over, but I eventually decided this was unnecessary because they were cooked enough to rise and hold their shape and they would only be charred on one side (My stove is either off or on high basically). So these pancakes worked out alright and it turns out that it is impossibl for me to make pancakes exactly the same size, so I just arranged them in order of size instead of trying to force them to vary.

I strung a bunch of blueberries and attached them and a raspberry to the pump with toothpicks.