Kitchen Lab: An Experiment in Cup-Pan-Cakes

My city has a lot of interesting brunchy places, with interesting items on their respective menus. I generally look for things I can’t make at home, or things that are rather a PITA to make, since hey, I CAN MAKE THAT AT HOME. But at a recent outing, I saw a glorious item on the menu that I’d never tried nor heard of.

CUPCAKE PANCAKES.

So yeah, we’re at this little sixteen-table, artisinal, also-a-fancy-grocery-with-olives sort of place, which means the description was all overblown with evocative adjectives and twenty-five cent words when a nickel would do. But what it boiled down to was that this place makes its own cupcake batter, and serves it to you in pancake form. For breakfast.

There weren’t really any fancy toppings or whatever; I don’t care how you want to say “fresh butter” and “real maple syrup,” that’s what you’re serving ’em with. And since I know I can make pancakes at home, and I can make cupcakes at home, I thought I’d give this hybrid a shot. Because I’ve never made cup-pan-cakes, and I wanted to try. FOR SCIENCE!

First I made some cupcake batter. (I’m sure you could use stuff from a mix, too, which just opens up whole realms of awesome cup-pan-cake possibilities. Keep interesting mixes in the cupboard, snazz up a random weekend breakfast!) And after the cupcake batter was prepared, I just treated it like pancake batter… and anyone who’s got Bisquick floating around can make a pancake. Heat griddle, add butter/cooking spray/whatever, pour batter, wait for bubbles, flip carefully, check for done-ness probably too often, eat. Yes? (Do I need to do a Pancake Lab? Because I’ll totally eat more pancakes.)

Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have treated it like pancake batter. For one thing, this cupcake batter was WAY runnier than the stuff I usually use for pancakes, so I kinda wound up with a whole pan full of cup-pan-cake. Which made things cook rather unevenly, and rather hard to flip. It got so unwieldy that I just gave up and frantically greased and heated another pan so I could flip half of the mess somewhere else… which really pointed out how unevenly they’d cooked. Sadness.

I also foolishly thought I could try to cook bacon at the same time as I tried out a new and unfamiliar thing. That had less disastrous results, but it still wasn’t ideal.

So. What had I done wrong?

First, I’d poured too much batter on the griddle at once. This cupcake batter, again, was way thinner than any pancake batter I’ve ever made, so rather than sticking together in a nice, pancake-shaped cohesive roundness it spread across the whole damn pan and gave me pancakes with corners. This is unfortunate, because the burner underneath does not have corners, and since I don’t have super-fancy even-heating pans this led to burny bits in the middle while there were still-runny bits on the edges.

Second, I made the griddle too hot. The cupcake batter just behaves differently than pancake batter because it’s thinner/runnier/more liquid-y, and it seems to need longer to cook itself. (Cook? Bake? I don’t even know any more.) But since the middle was burnt before the edges even solidified, I knew I’d need to use a lower temperature for a longer period of time. This is true for when you’re cooking just about anything where the middle is still cold but it seems like it’s piping hot on the outside… which has happened to me while baking, but I more often run into this while using the microwave. (I highly recommend exploring the power level settings on your microwave, btw.)

For round two (because there’s always more pancake batter), I re-greased the griddle and turned down the heat by probably half. Using about a third as much batter as I had in the first go ’round, the batter still really wanted to sneak over toward the lower edges and corners of my pan but I got far better results. While checking on the undersides far too frequently for my own good, I let them cook for about eleventeen times as long as  a normal pancake.

Okay, it just seemed like that long. I really wanted to try some cup-pan-cakes.

These ones looked quite a bit better, and as an added bonus of the longer cooking times they got all crispy on the outside.

That’s right, I’d just made cupcakes that were ALL TOPS. Seriously, try this at home.

They turned out pretty sweet, but not so sweet that you couldn’t still put syrup on them. Cupcakes are meant to be frosted after all, right? I’ll admit I went rather sparingly on the syrup at first, and these guys do absorb a lot more syrup than your typical pancake, so pour judiciously. Or you could just eat them plain, as I did with the leftovers the next day.

Holy foo, I just made a new thing! One that I’d never seen before, didn’t have a recipe for, and only saw a description of on a menu once. I think this is how you learn to cook… just keep trying random stuff that sounds good until it IS good.

What have you tried lately?