Blueberries are vegetables, right?

There's something about Thursday night which makes making dinner seem super unappealing - perhaps because we're almost-but-not-quite through the working week, and feel we need to conserve the last scraps of energy to get through Friday. Tonight in the Cake household this resulted in pancakes for dinner. Oops. ;-)

A while ago we went to an Annabelle White dinner (one of our Wellington on a Plate adventures) and I won a carton of buttermilk. Somehow with a very well-fed month and a couple of weekends away we still had this languishing at the back of the fridge - I had made sure we had plenty of frozen blueberries to make delicious blueberry buttermilk pancakes, but we'd never quite got to making them - and the recipe is even on the side of the carton. So it seemed a natural progression, really. (don't think too hard about the logic of making a batch of pancakes and hovering while they cook instead of making a simple dinner as it might not appear to be logic at all - just go with it!)

I knew the buttermilk had a really long best before date - and hey, it is supposed to be curdled, right? - but turns out we overshot by two days. Oh well -  it was fine, and though usually it doesn't get to be an issue for us I'm not super precious about these things; it does depend on the product but commonsense usually counts a lot more to me than the numbers on the packaging.

The recipe is pretty straightforward - plonk everything except the blueberries and butter in a bowl, mix it all up, then add the last two ingredients, combine, cook. Easy peasy.

Though the recipe calls for the blueberries to be mixed through you could choose to scatter them over the batter once you put it in the pan if you like a less swirly, blue effect; it's inevitable that as soon as you start stirring the juice will go everywhere. I think it looks kinda cool, though.

This is a very thick mixture, so I should have been using a lower heat since it takes longer for them to cook through, and some of mine got a teeny bit too dark... Oops! Being so thick they are also tricky to flip - I'm usually able to flip pancakes without the help of a spatula but with these it was more like a spatula on each side, ease it over and they still liked to crumple! But they are luscious and thick, and it's the taste that matters (mostly).

I like my pancakes quite dark so my zealous application of heat to frypan worked out well for me. Mr Cake, on the other hand... Well, he likes his like this:

Cooked on one side only. I kid you not. He asked for this little baby one when it was only half way through. Is he mad or am I mad for thinking he's mad? You be the judge. ;-)

Blueberry Buttermilk Pancakes (adapted from the Tararua buttermilk carton)
Ingredients
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
zest of 1 lemon
45g butter, melted
1 cup blueberries

Mix all ingredients except butter and blueberries together until well combined. Add remaining ingredients and fold together.

Add butter to a frypan over medium heat (the butter is optional if you have a non-stick frypan but I love the flavour too much to omit it) and scoop batter in. Cook until bubbles begin to form (you'll only see a couple, probably) then turn and cook until browned to your liking. Serve with lashings of maple syrup, or lemon juice and sugar. Makes 2-4 servings, depending how hungry you are! ;-)