Make your own homemade pancake mix and fill with freshly picked, sweet and juicy North Carolina blueberries & topped with blueberry syrup

A while back a blogger friend showed us the inside her pantry, but apologized for having Bisquick on her shelf. She said her children beg for pancakes, so she kept a mix handy. I sent her an email and asked why she didn’t just make her own mix. It’s so easy, much less expensive, and requires only eight ingredients, all of which are either in your pantry or in your refrigerator.

While we don’t personally have an objection to using Bisquick and occasionally use it ourselves, the partially hydrogenated oil found in the list of ingredients is reason enough to make your own mix. You’ll find a recipe for pancakes (or they're sometimes called griddle cakes) in any basic cookbook, such as The Joy of Cooking or Fannie Farmer. In How to Cook Everything author Mark Bittman says about his basic pancake mix recipe, "Americans must have been sadly alienated from the kitchen for pancake mixes to ever have gained a foothold in the market, for these are ridiculously easy to make."

Roadside farm stands here in the mountains of North Carolina are selling fresh, juicy, sweet blueberries, some for as little as fifty cents a box. As you know from my last post, we buy fresh and local whenever we can. We probably ought to have a bumper sticker (if I didn’t dislike stickers so much) on our car saying, “We break for farm stands.”  Sometimes they taste so good we eat the entire box in the car on the way home, but today we intentionally saved some for blueberry pancakes.

My husband Meakin made these delightful cakes for breakfast and topped them with luscious blueberry syrup that puts them over the top in taste. Enjoy.

Homemade pancake mix with fresh blueberries & Meakin's blueberry syrup
Adapted from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook

Dry ingredients:
1 cup all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon salt

In a bowl, mix all of the dry ingredients together with a whisk. Store in an air-tight container until you’re ready to make pancakes.

Liquid ingredients:
½ - ¾ cup milk at room temperature
2 tablespoon sweet butter, melted
1 large egg, beaten to blend
½ to ¾ cup fresh blueberries

To add the liquid ingredients, whisk together the milk, butter and egg lightly in a separate bowl. Start out using ½ cup milk. You can always add more if necessary. Add the premixed dry ingredients all at once to the wet mixture, stirring just enough to dampen the flour. Add the blueberries, but don’t over mix.

Lightly grease a griddle or frying pan and set over moderate heat until a few drops of cold water tossed in the pan begin to sizzle and dance about. Drop about 2 to 3 tablespoons of the batter onto the pan. Cook until the tops of the cakes are full of bubbles, slightly dry on the edges, and the undersides are lightly browned.

Flip cakes over and cook the other side until done. Place finished cakes on an ovenproof plate in a warm, 200 degree F oven until you have enough to begin to serve. Top with a pat of butter and Meakin's blueberry syrup (recipe below). Makes 2 to 4 servings.

Meakin's Blueberry Syrup

1/3 cup fresh blueberries
¼ cup water
2 – 3 tablespoons sugar (depending on the sweetness of the berries)
1 slice (not chopped) of fresh gingerroot, about 1/8” thick
1 tablespoon honey

In a saucepan add all of the ingredients except the honey. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium low and simmer until the blueberries have burst and you have a syrupy consistency. Remove and discard the slice of gingerroot. Add the honey and serve warm over buttered pancakes.