I’ve Got Your Saturday Morning Covered

What are you gonna eat for a leisurely, lovely Saturday morning breakfast?  I know!  I know!  Hey, pick me!

The answer is:  Apple Cider Pancakes with Apple Cider Syrup that’s so good it should come with a warning label.  I fussed with these recipes all last week in preparation for our Pre-Walk Pancake Party and, after eating my weight in pancakes, I ended up going with this recipe with nary an alteration.  I added cinnamon to the first batch, but took it out of the second and I like it just the way it is.  It uses vanilla yogurt with no added sugar and it’s makes a cake with a delightful texture that isn’t too sweet and serves as the perfect balance to the syrup.

The syrup was a little bit trickier.  I love the base recipe (which I found on lots of blogs and web sites) but I felt it needed some softening and thickening at the end.  So – I started with this:

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 2 cups apple cider
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 cinnamon sticks

Preparation:

In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, melt butter. When butter stops foaming, add the apple cider, brown sugar, and cinnamon sticks. Bring to a boil, stirring. Continue cooking over medium heat, stirring frequently, until reduced by half to about 1 to 1 1/4 cups. This will take about 15 minutes. The syrup will thicken as it cools.

Except, it didn’t really thicken much.  And it was very delicious, but very intense.  So I added about 3/4 cup of maple syrup (just taste as you go to see how apple-y you want your syrup to be) and then I thickened the rest of it with a little corn starch.  For one batch, I added some apple pie spice, but I didn’t like it very well.  Those spices seem really bossy to me and they took over the fresh apple flavor.  One note:  cinnamon sticks really do work much better than ground cinnamon because you want to keep the syrup smooth and silky, rather than grainy.

For the Pancake Party, I quintupled the pancake recipe and tripled the syrup.  I bought a big red bucket and mixed up the pancakes in that and it worked out perfectly.  I also experimented with making the batter the night before and cooking them up in the morning and that was great too.

So – there you have it – a happy breakfast to welcome fall!

I’d love to know:  what’s your favorite recipe for this beautiful season?

Loving Autumn,

Bo