Preamble

It’s been a long long time since I made anything from Gordon Ramsay’s Cookery Course. I just fell off the wagon when Uni got a bit intense and money was running low. I’ve decided to slowly ease myself back into it with some of the simpler recipes from the book. The recipes that aren’t going to make me live off lentils for a month. As such this is my first foray into said recipes.

These pancakes were delightful. They were easy, fresh and according to the person I fed them to, they were “the best pancakes [I’ve] ever had”.

Prep and cooking

I don’t think anything gets simpler than pancake batters. Mix dry ingredients well, then mix in wet ingredients and leave to rest. This recipe was no different.

Where it differs from normal recipes is the use of desiccated coconut in the batter itself – a coconut flour almost. This lent a subtle sweetness to the actual pancake – instead of using sugar or other sweeteners. The coconut I used was some delightful coconut chips from the Philippines that I was gifted – I ate half the damn bag before putting them into the batter.

The other coconut aspect is the use of coconut milk instead of normal milk. Further upping the coconut “oomph”. The coconut milk adds a whole new level of creaminess that you don’t get from normal milk.

The actual cooking was exactly the same as normal pancakes. The old saying that the first one is the worst just didn’t apply here. The more pancakes I made, the worse they got. But my god, they were beautiful.

I decided to omit the lime syrup and instead just drizzled lime juice over the pancakes at the end. I had no interest in using 150g of caster sugar. It’s just diabetes waiting to happen.

Taste

These tasted amazing. Small flakes of coconut popping through the pancake which was subtly creamy and coco-nutty. The mango provided a nice sweet yet tart contrast, and the sprinkle of lime juice just brought it all together. I honestly could eat this every weekend quite happily.

There is very little to fault overall, and I can’t imagine how much nicer it would taste with the full sugar syrup.

Verdict

This goes up there into my list of “to-go” dessert recipes. The key is ripe mangoes (which are hard to come by in England). The ingredients are easily obtainable from any big supermarket or even your Asian store. The recipe is simple, the technique is simple. There is honestly little wrong with this recipe and the taste is bang on.