Oreos in stuff

For the first time since coming to London, I am actually feeling sick of food. At the rate I was going at all the cookies and cakes, I didn't think it was possible for this day to finally arrive.

This sudden crisis is also due to the fact that I had an all-snack-and-no-meal Saturday. Yesterday's diet consisted of a crumpet and several chocolate digestive biscuits for breakfast, cereal bars and more biscuits for lunch, and oreo-chocolate pancakes for dinner at midnight. I didn't have anything savoury, and after the pancakes, my stomach felt extremely uncomfortable, and I really felt the need for something proper like chicken or pasta.

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That was yesterday, Sunday the 2nd of December. I'm feeling fine now, after having some proper food, and I'm back to normal (i.e eating 6 10 cookies and a cup of rice pudding before dinner). Anyway, enough with making myself feel guilty. Here is what I got up to during the weekend:

My friend Adel lives with a middle-to-old-aged (let me know if anyone finds a better term for this age group, thanks) Singaporean lady who lives in a house full of high-tech gadgets and complicated kitchenware. The trashcan opens automatically when you pass your hand over it.

One of these fancy gadgets is a £500 blender. The container is made out of plastic, surprisingly, and not Swarovski crystals. Anyway, Adel has the privilege of using this blender, and likes making smoothies with it. In her world, smoothies consist of a large variety of fruits such as berries, bananas, oranges, apples and the like, blended with milk, and ice. In my world, smoothies  have to consist of crushed oreos, and, unless readily available, with harsh weather or no grocery stores in close proximity, ice cream.

So after Adel blended her gazillion species of fruits, we washed out the blender and put in 3 or 4 oreo cookies, some crushed ice, milk, whipped cream, and the secret ingredient – peanut butter. It was just a knifeful (I am creating some revolutionary, essential vocabulary over here.) but it added such a lovely touch to the drink. To top it all off, I sprayed a generous amount of whipped cream on the top, and Adel threw on a pineapple cube to turn it into a piña colada wannabe.

I do like that cup.

The oreos came in a long packet, so when we decided to make pancakes in the middle of the night, I simply couldn't waste those extra oreos, could I?

FIgure 1.1

What you can observe in Figure 1.1 is three pancakes containing chopped oreos topped with melted chocolate topped with whipped cream topped with more crushed oreos. If the topping is bothering you, here's how the pancake looks like on it own:

It looks diseased but who cares, it was a great idea.

The batter mix

I'm usually a wuss who follows recipes word-for word, as I am afraid of screwing up the outcome and wasting the ingredients to create something barely edible. This time, Adel said that she usually made pancakes without a recipe, and I decided to go with it as well. I'd made pancakes before, so I knew how the batter should look and how the frying should go.

We added milk to flour until it was liquidy and creamy, and I put in chopped oreos while Adel added cinnamon powder to hers. Then all we added was sugar and vanilla extract, and that was it. I guess this pancake is the most basic pancake ever, if you're lacking eggs and it is 12am in the mornight.

The pancakes turned out slightly moist, dense and squidgy on the insides, but they tasted fine. Adel's turned out better because her mix had more milk, so the pancake spread more, and came out of the pan thinner, so the denseness of the inside wasn't too obvious. I think eggs were the major missing factor, and the fluffiness would have been there if we had used some self raising flour or bicarbonate of soda.

But if you are low on ingredients and are looking for a quick fix to your pancake craving, then just throw some flour and milk together and whatever else gets the taste in, and you have a basic pancake good to go.

Oh, don't be impatient and turn up the heat on the stove, I did that out of impatience and it killed my last pancake. Be sure to cook pancakes on low heat and flip them over when you see a number  of popped bubbles forming on the top.

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On a side note, I can't wait until this Sunday, when I will be taking a flight home on my own for the first time, back to Singapore and back to my mum's supply of ingredients and a kitchen for me to bake in!