Pancakes, pikelets, hotcakes, griddlecakes, flapjacks…what the hell are they?!!

“And what’s happened to the Earth?”
“Ah. It’s been demolished.”
“Has it,” said Arthur levelly.
“Yes. It just boiled away into space.”
“Look,” said Arthur, “I’m a bit upset about that.”
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams

Now, I was going to talk about the brunch I whipped up for J and I the other morning but I encountered a dilemma…here’s where I got:
Ah, there’s nothing better than
Yeah, well, it seems a bit of a confusing thing having so many different names for the same thing. I think in New Zealand we would call them pikelets because pancakes here are traditionally basically crêpes and ‘cause they’re so big and thin flipping them over always freaks me out! I took a little trip to everyone’s favourite encyclopaedia for some answers to my problem. Here I’ve done a couple of searches. One for pancakes and the other for pikelets (hotcakes, girddlecakes and drop-scones all went to the pancake page too...but flapjacks? I’ll get to those).

Now, on the pancake page it mentioned the word flapjack so when I looked that up I was very confused because Wikipedia seemed to be trying to tell me that this was a kind of muesli slice thing (well, that’s what I got from their description...I guess a tray-bake is a slice??).

This whole thing reminds me of the difficulty I’ve run into sometimes when I’ve talk to my sister-in-law in the States. Sometimes she has no idea what I’m talking about so I have to wrack my brain for another word for it. It happens when I’m reading a book and I come across words such as college. College here is what I think the States calls high school. We call college university. I come across it in recipe books. What the hell is powdered sugar? Oh, right, icing sugar etc. I’ve found that us in little old New Zealand have adopted words from everywhere so we are quite good at working out what some unusual word might mean. Chances are we already use it sometimes.

So, onto our brunch. I’m loath to use the word pancake ‘cause that just doesn’t ring true for me and pikelets seem too much like plain jam and cream things you might have with tea a bit like plain scones so I’m going to settle on hotcakes, after all I have seen a recipe by our lovely Alison Holst for hotcakes and because hers and mine have rolled oats in them they have something in common so I feel on safe ground!! J and I were feeling terribly shady and exhausted on Easter Monday and felt like something tastier than our usual muesli (another one of those words that confuses some people) and fruit so it was a toss up between corn fritters and hotcakes (savory or sweet). It was going to be corn fritters…but there was no tinned sweetcorn in the pantry so hotcakes it had to be!

Shady Hotcakes

1 banana, mashed
¾ cup soy milk (I think although you might want a bit more)
2 Tbsp peanut butter
¾ cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp cocoa
½ cup rolled oats
2 Tbsp brown sugar
5 small feijoas, diced

Mix the mashed banana, soymilk and peanut butter together in a large bowl.

Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa into a bowl. Add the rolled oats and sugar then mix together. Add to the wet ingredients, mixing until just combined. Lightly stir through the feijoas.

Heat some oil up in the frypan and drop large spoonfuls of the mixture onto the pan. Turn over when beginning to brown on the other side.

These are best hot and you can put whatever you like on them (we had mixtures of peanut butter, jam and finely chopped dark chocolate) but we had the leftovers cold later in the day and they were still delicious.