Bite Upon Bite: Whole Wheat Pancakes / Pancake Mix

My kids adore hearty, fluffy whole wheat pancakes. Offer them Krusteaz, and they wrinkle their noses and play with the pancakes. "What are these things?" they seem to say. "Where's the real food?"

I love to make my homemade pancakes for them because it's fun to watch breakfast consumed with such joy. That said, if you make the whole recipe every time , your toddler may abandon all hope of ever being fed again, and wind up eating two bowls of cold cereal before the pancake ever appears on the scene. See yesterday for example.

So I like to make a big canister full of the mix. Mine that I made yesterday was 9 times the real recipe. I just start with a container that I want to use to store the mix, and measure the flour in by two cup increments until I know how many I am going to do. Then I increase the mix accordingly.

So here's the recipe. This amount makes about 6 pancakes if you use 1/2 C batter per pancake. Which I do. Who doesn't love a humongous pancake? This recipe fed my husband and I and our two little girls yesterday for breakfast.

Pancake Mix:
2 C whole wheat flour
1 T baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 T sugar
4 T powdered milk

This is it. Just put in the ingredients in these proportions and mix well. (Helpful hint: 4 T =1/4 C. Saves my sanity, since measuring out 9 T of baking powder and sugar is not how I want to spend my Sunday morning.)

These are all ingredients that I store separately in my cupboards, so I just let this mix sit in my cupboard in the canister. When I'm ready to make the pancakes, I just measure out two C of the mix, add 1 egg and between 1 1/4 and 1 1/2 C water.

Then I mix the whole thing and fry on a medium hot griddle.

I like to do about 1/2 C batter per pancake, but a 1/3 C might be a more reasonable size.

I use the 1 1/2 C water because I like thinner pancakes. But of course you run the risk of doing this:

which is LAME. :)

I have one more pet peeve with pancakes, and that is I hate trying to butter them after they've cooled. I don't want to see the butter on my pancake. I want the butter lovely and melted and invisible. I solve this and also the problem of pulverizing a pancake with insufficiently softened butter by melting the butter and brushing it on the tops of the pancakes while the underside cooks with a pastry brush. Perfect every time.