I suppose it’s a good day when the worst thing that happens is your camera won’t hook up to your computer anymore, but it does mean nobody but me ever gets to see these lovely blueberry pancakes.  Don’t worry, even if you can’t see them, they’re still delicious.  🙂

Jocelyn posted natural-sugar pancakes a while back, and we’ve both done banana pancakes.  In that post I lamented not having a basic pancake recipe I was happy with, so I asked myself, what could I substitute for the mashed banana to get the texture and thickness I wanted, but without making the pancakes feel “specialty”?  Turned out the answer was a second egg.  I know, I should’ve thought of that one a while back.  🙂

In any case, here’s a good basic pancake recipe, and if you want blueberry pancakes, just add in the optional blueberries at the end.  We had a lot of fun making these, as Ginny had never made anything with blueberries from scratch before.  🙂  She suggested piercing or mashing the blueberries to release the juice when we added them to the batter, and my sister and I just grinned and said don’t worry, that’ll take care of itself — and boy does it.  Be careful biting into a blueberry pancake just off the pan, though, as those puppies will pop like little delicious heat grenades inside your mouth and burn your tongue!  😀

Basic (Or Blueberry) Pancakes

Yield:  about 10 pancakes

Ingredients:

• 1 cup dough mix
• 1/8 tsp xanthan gum
• 1/8 tsp guar gum
• 1 tsp baking powder (preferably aluminum-free)
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 T sugar
• 1 T butter, hard or soft
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup milk
• optional:  1/2 to 3/4 cup fresh blueberries, rinsed and drained

Directions:

1.  Separate both eggs, reserving the yolks.  Whip the egg whites in the bowl of a stand mixer, using the whisk attachment, until stiff peaks form; set aside.

2.  In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients — dough mix, xanthan gum, guar gum, baking powder, salt, and sugar.  Then, with a fork or a pastry cutter, cut the butter into the dry mix until crumbly.

3.  Whisk the vanilla, milk, and reserved egg yolks into the batter until smooth.  Then, add the whipped egg whites, and whisk into the batter until fully integrated and smooth.  If you want blueberry pancakes, fold in the blueberries at this point (after the egg whites).

4.  Heat a lightly greased skillet to medium to medium-high.  Once it’s hot, pour 1/4-cup-fuls of batter onto the skillet to cook.  The typical pancake test of waiting for bubbles to form and pop isn’t quite as useful for this batter as for my banana pancake batter, so you might want to peek at how the skin of the pancake’s coming along a little more often or a little sooner than you might otherwise.  Flip each pancake to cook the other side, then lather, rinse, repeat till the batter’s all cooked.  🙂

5.  Enjoy!  (And be careful of those hot grenades of blueberry juice!)  😀

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