Did Someone Say Brunch?

The year before my family emigrated from the UK to New Zealand, we spent a summer over here staying with my mum's cousins.  Our first ever Kiwi Christmas, we were served up pikelets for breakfast.  New to summer Christmas customs, I remember Mum asking if a pancake breakfast was tradition and my 'aunty' Audrey saying, "It is now!".  Fast forward sixteen years and pancakes and pikelets have become synonymous with special occassions.  Every birthday, long weekend and Christmas morning we have a spread of pancakes, pikelets or waffles, hot berries, fresh Greek yoghurt  or cream and golden syrup.  Consequently, I love pancakes!  Not just for what they represent, but for the endless topping possibilities and my uncanny ability to eat my weight in them without getting full.

Mum's pancakes were thin crepes, designed to make a couple of eggs and a cup of flour feed a family of five, and perfect for filling with chocolate chips, rolling up and dipping in yoghurt!  There is no recipe in the world that can replicate the fun of sharing a table with family, eating pancakes with sticky fingers on a holiday weekend, but that doesn't mean there's no place at all for pancakes on a normal day.