New Year's Ginger Pancakes

You may read this post too late to make these New Year's morning. Or New Year's lunch or New Year's dinner. But, there is always New Year's weekend and, well, anytime during the New Year.


We usually have pancakes Sunday evening for dinner. I make a hot meal (often on Saturday) to have Sunday noon for when we get home from church. Sunday evening rolls around and I feel as if I've done my culinary duty for the day, so the meal is turned over to Jamey who makes wholewheat pancakes (from scratch, people) often with blueberries or raspberries.

The Saturday before Christmas (which came with 20-some inches of snow) found Miriam and I on the couch in front of the TV. Jamey was out shoveling and the kids were out playing in all that snow. We don't have cable. Prior to the whole DTV switch-over, we got five channels with the antenna on our roof. After the switch-over, we get seven channels. How lucky are we!? We lost one and gained three including a PBS channel called Create. From what I can gather, it's like one of those fancy home/cooking/garden channels you find on regular cable, but PBS' version. I rarely get a chance to watch it.

Anyway, this particular Saturday, this lady named Katie Brown was making these Ginger Pancakes that looked amazing. I presented the recipe to Jamey on his laptop and asked him to help me make them for Sunday evening. My brother and his wife were over playing with our kids outside and I wanted to feed them. I wanted to feed them good. Fooey. I wanted to feed myself good.

They were divine- rich (cream cheese) and light (lemony) all at the same time. You just make regular pancakes with a few spices added to the batter. On the stove you mix up a simple lemon syrup that, in essence, was thinned-out lemon curd. Then, you spread some cream cheese on one end of each pancake, roll them up and drench them in the lemony goodness. Please make these, people. Please!


Here is the link to Katie Brown's recipe. We made a couple changes. We like Jamey's pancakes, so we just added the spices to the dry ingredients and made them as usual. I'm sure Miss. Brown's version would be good, too. Next, we used bottled lemon juice and it worked fine. Lastly, I filled them with less cream cheese than she called for and they were still fabulous.

Happy, Happy New Year everyone!!!