Bunny and Turtle Flapjacks for kids

Here's my take on what my late granny used to call 'crumpets', but they're actually griddle cakes or flapjacks. Scribbled into animal shapes, they make a fabulous weekend breakfast for kids. It took a bit of practice to get the shapes just right, and I tried a spoon, a funnel and a piping bag before I settled on the right tool: a turkey baster. [Postscript: a commenter on this post suggested a squeezy bottle: a brilliant idea, as it holds that much more batter. ]

(Funny. No one ever wants to help me make these 'crumpets' - just like the tale of the little red hen and her cake - but this time there was a queue of children demanding a turn. I wish I had photographed the smiley faces, anarchy signs, etc, devised by the teen.)

Some tips:

-This is quite a thick batter, and it needs to be, or else the liquid spreads too quickly. Squeeze the bulb of the baster tightly and suck up as much batter as you can get in one squeeze.

-Make sure the pan is very hot, but not smoking. Work quickly, or the batter will go brown before you've had a chance to do the fiddly bits.

- Don't make the joins between the legs and body too thin, or they will break off as you flip the cakes.

-Draw the outline of the animal first, and then fill in the gaps. For the turtle, draw in the four feet, in a square formation, fill them in, then swiftly outline the body. Add the head, fill it in, and finally fill in the body.

For the bunny, do the ears, then the head, then the body and finally the tail. Flip over, cook for a few minutes, and serve.

I've abandoned my Granny's crumpet mixture (sorry, Gran) in favour of this one, which is thicker, fluffier and more reliable. This griddle-cake batter comes from one of my vintage cookery pamphlets: The Royal Cookbook by 'The Royal Hostess' , published the Royal Baking Powder (no date, but looks about 1958, judging from the photographs).

Royal Griddle Cakes

2 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups (375 ml) milk
2 cups (500 ml) white cake flour, sifted
a pinch of salt
6 t (30 ml) baking powder
3 T (45 ml) white sugar
2 T (30 ml) melted butter

Put all the ingredients into the bowl of a food processor and beat until smooth. If you don't have a food processor, beat the eggs and milk together in a big bowl. Sift over the flour, salt and baking powder and whisk until well combined. Finally, stir in the sugar and the melted butter. Set aside for 10 minutes, but do not stir again.

Heat a frying pan or flat griddle and grease lightly with a knob of butter wrapped in waxed paper. Drop the mixture in spoonfuls on the hot griddle, leaving room for spreading (or use turkey-baster - see above - to make shapes). When bubbles appear on the top, use a pallet knife or fish-slice to flip the the cakes. Cook for another minute or so, place between the folds of a clean napkin or tea towel, and keep warm.

Lovely hot with honey or syrup, and whipped cream or plain Greek yoghurt.

Makes about 16 griddle cakes.

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Cream horns, Hitler, Mrs Wicks, and the joy of the vintage cookbook

I bet you've never heard of Mrs Wicks. Well, neither had I, until yesterday, when I bought her cookbook, issued in 1939 by the Shell Company of South Africa. I was thrilled to add it to my small but growing collection of South African cookbooks and food manufacturers' pamphlets from the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties, and even more delighted when I found several handwritten recipes and old war-time cuttings** pasted on the inside covers of the book.

Finding any hand-penned recipe tucked between the pages of a vintage cookbook, or written on its end-papers, tickles me pink.

Old, dog-eared, cake-batter-flecked books like this appeal to me for many reasons. The first is purely visual: their covers and illustrations are so enchanting and innocent, in a mid-century kind of way. Even the photographs, which are generally frightfully ugly - especially when they involve jellied savoury rings and stuffed eggs, with their piped-on, turdy toppings - have a peculiar appeal. But, most important of all, I appreciate these books for the fascinating historical documents they are.

They reflect so much of the last century's attitude to women as domestic goddesses and aproned, lipsticked home-makers. Read in this light, they are sometimes heart-breaking. Cookbooks of this era often contain little poems and homilies about how to show docility and consideration towards one's husband. A few of them - and particularly South African vintage cookbooks - lament the 'servant problem', making comments about their servants that make my cheeks burn with indignation and shame.

But the overriding value of these little books is the brilliant recipes they contain. Not all the recipes, mind you. The war-time recipes, which reflect the hardships of rationing, make dismal reading, with their scrag ends and powdered eggs and outer cabbage leaves. Kitschy recipes of the sixties and seventies, involving a lot of jelly powder, Ideal evaporated milk, tinned fruit and stuffed eggs, are not inspiring. But scattered all over these books, and especially in the cakes, bakes and preserves sections - which generally make up half of every cook book published before 1960; goodness, but our grandmothers loved cake - are many wonderful old recipes that quite obviously have been passed down from mother to daughter over countless generations.

Gingerbread, ginger beer, Boston Loaf, Sussex Pond Pudding, Queen's pudding, fruit cakes and puddings and pies, syllabub, and a host of old South African recipes such as bredies, koeksisters, Hertzoggies, samoosas, biltong, mampoer, boerewors, pickled fish, melktert... the list goes on and on.

These recipes, some of which are many centuries old, are becoming an endangered species as the culinary landscape is flooded with squid ink and fish sauce and Balsamic vinegar and horrid towers of cheffy saffron-this and cardamom-that.

I started collecting mid-twentieth-century cookbooks about two years ago, when I grabbed an old sixties cookbook my mother was turfing out. I flipped through it with the scornful attitude of one who reads glossy food magazines, and was about to turf it into the don't-want pile, when I came across a photograph of a rabbit-shaped white cake coated in coconut flakes, and, a few pages on, a ghastly - and frankly rather pornographic - picture of a pastry horn overflowing with whipped cream. Both pictures evoked the most extraordinary response: I was transported in an instant back to 1967, and could feel myself standing on a chair on chubby toddler legs in our family kitchen, poring over the very same cookbook, and wishing my mom would make rabbit cake and cream horns for pud. I could hear the low hiss of our gas stove, smell the comforting whiffs of potato-topped fish pie baking in the oven, hear the buzzing of fat flies trapped in the sticky, curling yellow fly-strip hanging from the kitchen ceiling. A petrified knot of neurons in my forty-something old brain unbundled themselves, and along came a flood of memories of my childhood. Reading these old books and pamphlets is like tasting memories; like burying my nose in my mom's floury apron.


** One of the war-time cuttings reads:

SEND HIM A CAKE. Here is the way to make it yourself.

The way to a man's heart.... that applies more than ever before nowadays. Here's a recipe we know will please him. [I am going to try this recipe out, along with the Cinnamon Loaf, written by Mrs Evans of Germiston, South Africa, in 1940, picture left, in the next few days, so please check back soon]

And, on the flip-side of the cutting, the news that Hitler received at his headquarters the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, who later returned to Budapest. Print Friendly