Flippin' good fun!

Dear Confused.com,

Thank you for your interesting post on pancakes.  I was intrigued to find out that by cooking pancakes I am actually moneysaving:

Meal	Time	Energy Used	Cost *
Oven cooked dinner	60 mins	1.2kw/h	17p
Microwave meal	10 mins	.75 kw/h	2p
Pancake on the hob	2 mins	1.2kw/h	1p

Read more: http://www.confused.com/gas-electricity/articles/pancake-challenge-competition#ixzz2KzBjVqsi

But did you also know that you can even make pancakes in a slow cooker?  Admittedly, it will be a big giant one, but you can cut it up and we all know how economical a slow cooker is!  It will even save you the worry of burning the pancakes or any 'flipping' disasters!  What's even easier is that you can do your measuring using a cup. If you don't like using rough measurements, a cup is equal to roughly 240ml.  Here's a link to a great recipe

Anyway, lots of fun was had making creative pancakes this Pancake Day.  Here's what we made:

 Pancake Day is never complete to me without a bottle of golden syrup and lots of fresh fruit.  

Firstly we created a giant sun pancake.  Simply made by making a plain pancake, using bananas for the eyes and a blueberry for the nose and chocolate sauce for the mouth and eyebrows.  The rays were made by alternating laying strawberries upside/downside.  It was great fun for my son to see a plain pancake turn in to something that looked quite comical. This pancake also didn't require much cooking skill, so it's a great project for children to help out with.

 The sun pancake was a big hit and everyone enjoyed eating him.  He was so big he required a punnet of strawberries to complete his rays of sunshine.

Being huge Toy Story fans, our next pancake was Mr Potato Head.  Again, this just required me to make a plain pancake and the decorating could be done in the main part by my four year old. 

 The following pancakes were ideas taken from the book 'OMG pancakes' by Jim Belosic and they were surprisingly easy to do.  They just required the use of a squirty bottle; you then had to draw the various shapes on the pan.  My son thought the creations were wonderful.  I have never seen him eat pancakes so quickly.

Elephant

 Dog

 Noughts and crosses.

The spaghetti was made by drizzling the plain batter around the pan and the meatballs were formed by making circles on the pan with pink batter.

 This one just required the addition of food colourings.  The eggs were made in two parts.

 This unicorn was made by drawing on the pan with various coloured batters and the addition of fruit and choc chips.

The children loved the creations and showed much more interest in them than the plain old pancakes we normally have each year.

Thank you Confused.com for the fun challenge!  If any of my readers would like to take part in the challenge you have until February the 28th to do so.  You can read more about the challenge here