The Karmic Kitchen: Dutch Baby Pancake

While Superbowl Saturday may have found most of the country shopping and prepping their chip dips, their wings, pre-ordering their delivery pizza and stocking up on carpet cleaner, Virginia Willis was not convinced that her Southern Saturdays should be spent elbow deep in dip. Instead she found herself hungry, hungry for Breakfast. Be still my cholesterol-laden heart!
I adore breakfast. Eggs, bacon, pancakes, French Toast, Benedicts, I love it all. Apparently Virginia loves breakfast too because she offered up FIVE different recipes for this week's episode of Southern Saturday with Virginia. What the heck should I make? The Mini Country Ham Cheddar Biscuits are always a good choice but I've still got yeast rolls hanging around so that was a no. The Fried Apple Pies look great especially a recipe with dried apples but I think I'll save that for another day. That left the frittata, the baked eggs or the Dutch Baby Pancake. I settled on the pancake because I'd never made one before. And it's really easy.

Here's how easy it is, preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Melt half a stick (1/4 cup) of butter, put it in your black iron skillet and put that skillet in the oven. Mix together 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup all purpose flour, 2 large lightly beaten eggs and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Pour the mixture into the hot skillet with the melted butter and bake for 15 to 20 minutes until it gets all puffy. Once it comes out of the oven you can slice it up and top it with any sort of sweet treats like blackberry jam or sliced strawberries or you can just dust it with powdered sugar. Hot, savory and sweet all at once. It's a great way to start your day.

Of course, I couldn't just leave it at that. I mean the oven was on anyway, why not take advantage of it. I blame Virginia with her damned Baked Egg suggestions. So I decided to make muffin size pancakes in some of the cups of my muffin tin and in the other cups? Come on people.....it's ME! Bacon nests with a baked egg. Once they were all baked, I put the bacon/egg nest in the mini Dutch Baby Pancake and made my own freaky McMuffin.

Now it wasn't perfect, the muffin tins proved too small for the mini-pancakes if the bacon nest was going to fit better. I'm thinking a glass custard cup next time which will solve my other problem. My eggs cooked quicker than the pancakes but since they were in the same muffin pan, not much I could do. With the pancake in it's own cooking vessel, I can take the eggs out when they are done and leave the pancake to keep cooking.