Marco's Pancakes

Makes 6-8 hand-sized pancakes.


Ingredients

• 1 cup of self-raising flour
• 1 cup of semi-skimmed milk
• 1/2 cup of almond meal
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of margarine
• 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
• pinch of salt

Preparation
Put the margarine and the milk in a pan and warm them up slowly. The milk must be just warm, not hot, and the margarine should be all melted. Stir gently if needed.
While the milk is warming up, sift the flour and almond meal in a bowl, then add the sugar, the salt and the baking powder.
Beat the egg and the lemon juice lightly and leave it on the side.
When the milk is warm and the margarine has melted, add the beaten egg to the flour, then the warm milk and start whisking. If the milk is hot, the egg will start cooking immediately and the mixture will get lumpy. Whisk until you get a smooth dense mixture . If it's too liquid, sift more flour into it while whisking.
Leave the pancake mix to rest for a minute or two. 


Cooking
While the pancake mix is resting, you can use this time to start heating up a frying pan on a medium-high heat. If the heat is too high the pancakes will burn easily on the outside without cooking properly, so this might take a little bit of experimenting.
I use olive oil to cook the pancakes, but some people prefer butter or margarine. With olive oil, I use a few drops in the middle of the pan and then shake the pan vigorously so that lots of tiny droplets roughly cover the whole surface.
Gently pour the pancake mix in the middle of the pan and let it cook for just over a minute. You should see lots of little bubbles being produced, covering pretty much the whole pancake. After a minute, check the bottom of the pancake: if it's a bit brown it's time to turn it over and let it cook for another minute or less.


The size of the bubbles depends on how much baking powder you put in the mix, so if few or no bubbles appear you can try adding a quarter of a teaspoon of baking powder to the mix and whisk again throughly.


Enjoy.