Knowing my usual escapades in the kitchen by now you would probably be surprised that I was ever allowed anywhere near that end of the flat, but I have one skill there that isn't genetically suppressed (or washing up) - somehow, I do have a baking ability. I made some very nice scones for a brunch gathering the other week.



Trouble was I was using a recipe for pancakes.

Not Pancakes

8 ounces of self-raising flour
3 ounces of sugar
2 eggs
About 6 tablespoons of milk, or as much as it takes to make it behave reasonably like a pancake mixture

1. Throw all the above together into a mixer for a couple of minutes (Traditional Scottish method: Stir with a wooden spoon for three hours)
2. Drop them out on to a hot griddle or frying pan one tablespoonful at a time (use a two-spoon scraping method for maximum efficiency)
3. Turn them over when they bubble on the surface

And that's about it. I'd got the recipe for them from my mum, and I remember it coming from a Be-Ro cookbook which was published in about 1796 that we keep on the shelf, under the name "Dropped Scones". But they'd always been... flatter, as I knew them before - these turned out to be about three quarters of an inch thick.

Perhaps it's due to self-raising flour not really existing anywhere I've been to in America, and an acceptable substitute being adding a ratio of baking powder and salt to plain flour, making them rise more than expected. Or it could be that a tablespoon is a lot smaller in America, and so I guessed the amount of milk wrongly (I would actually guess that ten American tablespoons is closer to what you want). It could be that either of those differences have somehow turned the recipe I always knew as pancakes into what they were always intended to be. Whatever these are, though, they were very nice.