Pancakes, revisited

Pancakes are awesome. They're decently inexpensive (have yet to do a price breakdown, but it's at least as cheap as sale-cereal once you factor in the syrup) they taste great and my family has yet to get tired of them.

But I have a problem. I've used The Best Recipe's recipe for pancakes ever since I got the book for Christmas and nothing can compare to them. Nothing. It's a fairly picky recipe where I have to be careful about which of my measuring cups I use (they each, despite saying they have the same capacity, vary by as much as a tablespoon) and be very precise in how I measure the clabbered milk.

I despise finicky recipes. There is nothing worse than a recipe that can give you glorious results but only 20% of the time based on a slight tweak in chemistry. The best recipes are fairly forgiving and still delicious. Even homemade bread isn't as picky as these pancakes. When I make them for real (buttermilk and everything) the baking soda can still be tasted which is another thing I despise.

In my mind, this level of pickiness makes them far from ideal and therefore imminently replaceable. I've been trying different recipes for pancakes for the last few days in an effort to 1) find a nice, forgiving one that my husband can accept as our forever pancakes and 2) gently acclimate my family to anything besides TBR recipe.

In Man's defense, he's fine with whatever. But I know that in his heart he'll remember the few times I've gotten the pancakes perfect and that will color his perception of whatever stack of flapjacks rests before him. My solution: get over what I think he's thinking and make my life easier.

In an effort to be more food storage friendly I've started tinkering with this recipe and converting it one using powdered milk and powdered buttermilk. We havn't gotten into powdered eggs yet since my resource for them is more expensive than fresh anyway and the very idea of powdered eggs makes my skin crawl.

Tweaking a pancake recipe is definitely easy around here but the most annoying thing is when they fold as they get turned so the texture can't be properly evaluated. Oh, well. Even the flap-jack-flip-flops taste good enough that my spawn descend upon them as locusts.

Powdered buttermilk means I need to adjust salt levels and baking soda levels, or even think seriously about eliminating the bicarb altogether since it has baking powder as well and just 1/4 tsp of baking soda makes the batter erupts like Mt St Helens after a lousy date.

Even if I don't get the perfect pancake, I can always add chocolate chips.



Or PB m&m's.

Is there anything chocolate or pb can't do?

Also, does anyone have a good pancake recipe that uses powdered milk and tiny bits of baking soda?