buttermilk pancakes with caramelised bananas.

I have this little HUGE soft spot for pancakes. It's the one thing that I love ordering while I'm abroad that makes me feel as if I'm home again, which is odd considering they originated in Greece (yes, I Wikipedia that..) But it also links me back to memories of being abroad like when I had an EPIC sized pancake in America, and by EPIC I mean the length of a mini platter (approx. 30cm wide), or when I ordered pancakes, also in America, and they gave me waffles...

Anyway, I've always made pancakes out of the shake 'n mix because I never really looked or bothered with making ones from scratch, and I was called out on this by my best friend when I was searching for pancake mix: "don't you always make things from scratch??", and my response: "not pancakes, they're special" - but this moment had always stuck in my mind, so with some left over buttermilk from the jam donut recipe I decided to make some buttermilk pancakes...from scratch.

This recipe makes 4x 20cm pancakes...I poured out too much in the first one, so the size had to be consistant...

INGREDIENTS:

• 1½ cups self-raising flour - once again, I had no self-raising so I substituted it with plain flour + baking soda...I really need to restock on self-raising...
• 2 tablespoon caster sugar + a bit more for the caramelised bananas, I don't know exactly how much I used...
• 375ml buttermilk
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon melted margarine
• 2 ripened bananas
• A bit of water....

METHOD:

1. Sift flour into a bowl
2. Create a well and mix in egg, margarine and buttermilk one-by-one until the batter is smooth
3. Pre-heat a non-stick pan over medium heat
4. Cook pancakes one at a time - as this batter isn't silky smooth like pancake mix, you will have to spread out the mixture until it's about ½cm thick
5. Flip pancake when you can see at least 50% of cooked pancake showing through the batter - given you didn't make it too thick... usually pancakes bubble to indicate it's breathing, but I think because I used plain flour it didn't do that properly...
6. Once the other side is cooked, pop onto plate
7. Repeat until the mixture is used up

Caramelised Banana Method:

1. Keep the pan you were using for the pancakes on
2. Cut bananas in half both length ways, and split
3. Put bananas inside-side down onto pan
4. Pour caster sugar to coat the bananas, and a little on the pan - splash some water until the sugar starts to bubble like caramel - sorry I don't have exact measurements...
5. Once caramel begins to brown (which is fairly quickly), flip bananas over to coat in the caramel
6. Fish the bananas out - be careful you don't burnt the caramel, burnt caramel tastes VERY bitter
7. VOILA! Put your bananas on top of your pancakes, and you're good to go!

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