My failure on trying to make “Queen Elizabeth Scottish Pancakes

Mr B told me that he saw a recipe in Chinese claiming to be Queen Elizabeth’s favourite pancakes. He was wondering if it was real and so I searched for the original English one, and I found one from Martha Stewart’s website .

I had no idea how much is a teacup so I searched using this website Convert Me and saw that teacup = 5 oz:

So we need 20oz of flour.

J came to help. I asked him to measure in small batches. As he was weighing the 1st five oz I found it to be quite a lot if we were to have 20oz. So I decided to halved everything.

I was using (amended from the recipe above):

• 1 egg, 2 tablespoon of sugar, around 2.5 oz of milk
• 10oz of flour, plus another 2.5oz of milk
• around 1.5 teaspoon cream of tartar, 1 tablespoon of baking soda
• 2 tablespoon of melted butter

As J was mixing the mixture I started worrying because it looked very dry to me. I made pancake before, using premixed ingredients, and I knew the batter should be a bit runny, not like what we were having, a solid dough!

So I fried on a flying pan with butter. It looked like pizza base rather than pancake! Total disaster! It tasted ok when eaten straight after frying it. But when left cold it tasted horrible.

My conclusions are 1) I must have put too much flour, 2) 1 teacup is NOT 5oz!

And, I still had to clean up the mess for something that did not go well. So despair.