Basic Buttermilk Waffles & Maple Syrup

After many, many weekends away, Shaun and I woke up on Saturday with nothing to do and nowhere to go. While I do make a mean scrambled egg, I decided to test my skills on a new recipe for this lazy Saturday.

Enter your basic buttermilk waffles. You'd be very surprised to know how challenging it is to find a simple, straightforward recipe for this classic dish. For the classics, there are few that I would consult. Betty Crocker, my mom, my grandmother's scraps-of-paper-recently-turned-recipe-book, The Joy of Cooking...and in this case, Alton Brown. With his signature obsessive recipe making of the mad scientist variety, it seems as though he knows that he's talking about.

Basic Buttermilk Waffles & Maple Syrup
*Adapted from Alton Brown
1 C all-purpose flour
1 C whole-wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbsp sugar
3 eggs, beaten
2 oz butter, melted
2 C buttermilk* (and if you don't have any, find out how to make your own, below)
Vegetable spray, for waffle iron
Maple syrup (the real, Vermont kind)

Preheat your waffle iron. In a mixing bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk together eggs and melted butter. Add the buttermilk. Add the wet ingredients to the flour mixture and stir until combined, but do not overmix. You'll have a few lumps in your batter. Allow to rest for 5 minutes.

Spray the hot waffle iron with vegetable spray and add the batter. Do not overload the batter, or you'll end up with a giant mess, like I did.

Since my waffle iron makes one lonely waffle at a time, I kept them warm on a sheet pan in a warm oven set to 200 degrees.

*Make your own buttermilk: If you wake up with the urge to make hearty buttermilk waffles, but don't have that one elusive ingredient, try making it yourself. Mix 1 cup of milk with 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice. Let sit for about 10 minutes while it curdles and then use in recipe. I doubled mine and put it together in a large measuring cup for easy access.

And while we were at it, we decided to have breakfast on the terrace, the latest place to get a makeover at the Humiston house.

So there you have it. A basic and easy waffle recipe that can easily be jazzed up with some blueberries, strawberries or even some nutella and powdered sugar thrown on top. Since my strawberries that I'd been saving all week turned out to be covered in mold, we went au naturale. So what do you think? Do you do waffles for breakfast? Have you ever made your own? From a mix? Or are you a fan of the Eggo?

Lemon Blueberry Buttermilk Pancakes

This past weekend, Shaun and I had a major jonesing to deviate from our usual scrambled eggs breakfast. Instead of our usual weekend fare, we decided that pancakes were in order. After an exhausting week, there's really nothing quite like homemade pancakes on a Sunday morning. Though I have certainly tackled hot cakes of the boxed variety, I had yet to make my very own. I decided to add a little twist to the basic buttermilk, making them even more special with some fresh additions that made the pancakes go from 'eh' to 'mmmm'. Let's get down to the goods...

Lemon Blueberry Buttermilk Pancakes
2 C all purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
2 C buttermilk
1/4 C melted butter
1/2 tsp lemon zest
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup blueberries (I used the frozen kind)

In a mixing bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a separate bowl, using a wooden spoon, mix the eggs and buttermilk together. Melt the butter and let cool for a few seconds. Add to the buttermilk and eggs (Note: beware when adding hot anything to eggs - it tends to make them scramble. Make sure it sits for at least a few seconds before combining). Add vanilla and lemon zest. Combine this with the flour mixture and mix just until combined. The batter will still be lumpy, but overmixing will cause tough, unfabulous pancakes. In a skillet or griddle, heat butter. Add batter and sprinkle the tops with blueberries (as many as you like). Cook for 2 to 3 minutes on each side, or until desired goldenness is reached. Serve with maple syrup and garnish with blueberries.
Oh, and since I still had buttermilk taking up space in my fridge from my Easter Pink Coconut Cupcakes, this was the perfect solution to using up almost the entire carton of leftovers. Though my cakes turned out a little more browned than I typically enjoy, the taste was perfection. Crispy on the outside, yet fluffy and cakelike on the inside, these pancakes are one for the permanent collection. Just a hint of lemon and vanilla gave these pancakes the extra oompffh they needed to really sing.

And if you just aren't into fruit in your pancakes (after all, I'm only a recent convert), something tells me that they'd be completely fabulous by replacing the lemon and blueberry with chocolate chips or even just a 1/2 tsp of cinnamon and some chopped pecans.

So there you have it. A basic yet decadent Sunday breakfast. But what I really want to know is, how do you like your pancakes?