Pancakes for One & Fruit Ale Syrup

It’s the Sunday morning after St. Patrick’s day and I’m not hungover because St. Patrick’s day is a garbage holiday and because I’m on antibiotics for an undisclosed infection of a major organ. Not wanting to prolong my doctor recommended sobriety and subsequent suffering from said recommendation, I mostly avoided beer the entire weekend…and drank gin instead. At least it was in moderation.

All of this is to say that I was feeling spry enough on a warm, sunny Sunday morning to whip up another culinary marvel. As I stood in my kitchen, washing my antibiotic down with the coffee I made using a single cup coffee press, carefully eyeing my cat (Erma) as she sits under her own poster-sized portrait hung on the wall waiting for her to barf up her breakfast, it dawned on me. No, it slowly oozed and sank in like some greasy, viscous dollar store body lotion…pancakes for one.

Instead of writing a single post about pancakes for one, I should really make it an entire category. 90% of the pancakes I make are for one which, if you have no shame, any batch of pancakes could be for one. At that point, this website should just be called pancakesforone.com but I don’t hate myself that much. Plus, I already wrote the title of the post into WordPress, added the meta data and conceived of this whole idea of “pancakes for one” as pretext to fucking write about, so it shall remain a single recipe.

If you’re still reading, I’m sorry about your lobotomy, but hold tight. I did make some good pancakes and they put up a hell of a fight. If you’re so inclined to recreate this recipe and intend to do it exactly as I did, then your first step it to put your bag of flour on an impossibly high shelf in your cupboard. Next, attempt to retrieve it and to have it fall from its perch and completely explode all over your kitchen. Fuck up number one.

I spent the next however many minutes apologizing to Erma for scaring her during her morning barf and coating her in a light dusting of flour while angrily attempting to clean up the mess. Be sure to clean your floors appropriately. Stepping into flour residue with your grandpa slippers might cause a nasty fall and then you’ll get your sweatpants dirty or worse.

The biggest fear of anyone who lives alone is having something happen to them and being found dead weeks later in an incident that could have been prevented (like swallowing a Lego) if they had someone around. I felt like falling into a pile of flour on my kitchen floor and bleeding out seemed most likely in this scenario, so I did a quick, moist wipe-down of the spill zone.

Once I overcame that tremendous obstacle, I went ahead and mixed everything together and let the batter rest as per usual. Things seemed to be back on track and I happily popped the cap on a bottle of New Glarus Serendipity fruit ale. Such a happy little beer name for such a sad sack recipe, but we all need to douse a little optimism on our metaphorical “pancakes for one” or life would be one dry, over-fried panned cake. What am I even talking about.

Fruit ale syrup. Ok, so fuck up number two happened when I reduced the first bottle of beer and added it to the icing mixture in a separate bowl. This was dumb and I know better so I dumped it out, cursed a lot and glared at the remnants of flour in the corner of my kitchen because I needed to direct my anger at something other than my own incompetence.

Bottle number two was in the sauce pan and on its way to a boil before bottle number one had circled the drain and disappeared forever; just another scar on a fragile psyche already teetering. I really needed to focus now, because I only had one bottle left in the fridge and the probability of fuck up number three seemed all too high. This time around, I nailed it. I got the beer down to a decent reduction, added the icing stuff to the sauce pan and let it thicken up.

So after dropping batter and making two gigantic apple cinnamon pancakes and adding a thin later of some tangy af Greek yogurt, I drizzled that tangy af syrup all over those beauties. My eyes lit up on first taste, not because it was so good, but I could feel my antibiotics kicking in. Health and prosperity on the horizon. I guess the pancakes were awesome, too.

A bit more dense than my normal pancake (not sure why, probably missed an ingredient), but they had an awesome contrast from the inherit sweetness from the batter and dehydrated apple, some bitterness from the cinnamon and high-tang from the yogurt and fruit ale syrup. It was a morning that went from “pancakes…for one…” to “PANCAKES for ONE, MFer!” It’s all about perspective.