Blueberry Pancakes

A basic, reliable recipe for blueberry pancakes that can be adapted to include any fruit that you like. The secret ingredient - cake flour - helps these buttermilk pancakes turn out with a tender, light texture.

Saturday mornings were pancake mornings when I was growing up; my dad used to make his special recipe -- incorporating oats, honey, and cornmeal -- for pancakes almost every weekend, and we clamored for them when he was out of town. In season, he would pile in fresh blueberries picked the afternoon before from the bushes growing in the backyard; in the winter we would eat them plain, or with the last frozen bits of summer's preserved bounty.

Alas, somewhere along the way, I lost my taste for the things. I am more of an oatmeal eater, a whole-wheat toast smeared with peanut butter and jam sort of a diner, and I am usually not interested in eating a big breakfast of heavy, bready sweets. I'll let the occasional egg slip in once in a while, but my standard work-a-day breakfast is a cup of green tea (or coffee, if I'm very tired), and a bowl of Irish oats (see also: why I love horses) with soy 'milk.'

However, I decided to make a batch of blueberry pancakes adapted from a Joy of Cooking recipe. Now,efore I expound on the taste of my blueberry pancakes, let me say just this: frying pancakes is hard. It is particularly so when you own a cast-iron pan and have a tiny gas range on which to balance it -- you may find yourself contorting in strange positions trying to avoid burning fingers and dropping batter all over the (newly-shining) floor. I think the most difficult part for me was getting the temperature just right; I burned the first couple of cakes right off and had to scrape the (cursed?) cast-iron clean. There may or may not have been a moment of frustration that involved wailing about how I'd never get it right and why was I spending a beautiful sunny morning trapped inside with a recalcitrant stove and curmudgeonly pancake batter.

Yet I persevered, if only because the blueberries had colored the mix a pretty purple-blue and I was interested to see how it would turn out once cooked. I fiddled around with the temperature (start out on high heat, then reduce to a low simmer on the dial) and cajoled my pan into maintaining an even temperature -- imperative for well-cooked, fluffy pancakes. Eventually, I was able to produce a lovely plate of nicely-fried cakes, that rested, softly steaming in the sunshine, on the dining room table accompanied by some delicious farmers market fruit.

And how did they taste? Light enough for the pancake-averse because of the cake flour (who knew? It is one of my favorite secrets), with a hint of the vanilla I threw in as a last-minute addition, plump and juicy with blueberries. The buttermilk adds delectable moisture (which is essential if one, ahem, wanders away for a few moments to set the table and returns to find her pancake a bit overdone) and its delicate tang balances the sweetness of the berries.