hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with Scottish oak cakes that's
right these amazing oatmeal pancakes are the perfect breakfast solution for
people that just cannot decide whether they want pancakes or opening but before
we get started I should explain the Scottish oak cakes I'm doing here
are the softer pancake leg version as opposed to the more popular Scottish Oh
cake recipe which is sort of a drier and much denser cookie and while there's
nothing wrong with that version I just don't want it for breakfast especially
if I'm making these for some kind of fancy brunch like Mother's Day so now
that we've cleared that up we can go ahead and get started by dumping 1 cup
of rolled oats into this saucepan and by the way these are the regular rolled
oats not the quick cooking kind and then what we want to do here is pour in an
equal amount of heavy cream and we will give that a stir and bring all this up
to a simmer on medium high and by the way while I really want you to use the
regular rolled oats for this if you have to use the instant kind I would say just
skip this step and just mix the cream in cold and don't cook it and I'll try to
touch on that in the blog post but assuming we're using regular rolled oats
what we'll do is bring this up to a simmer and we'll go ahead and give it
another stir and then all we're gonna do is let this cook for exactly one minute
before turning off the heat and letting this cool down to room temp okay so
we're not cooking the oatmeal all the way through we're basically just giving
it a little head start before we mix in the rest of the ingredients okay so to
recap we will let that cook for exactly 60 seconds and we'll turn off the heat
and let that cool down to room temp or a leaves very close to it and once that is
cooled down we'll go ahead and transfer that into a mixing bowl and we'll add in
the rest of our ingredients and as you can see it's that stuff cools down it's
gonna get nice and thick which is exactly what we want and then once
that's been transferred in we'll go ahead and add a little bit of lemon both
the freshly grated zest and a little bit of the freshly squeezed juice and I
should mention these are usually made with buttermilk which is pretty tangy so
the lemon here is going to help make up for that acidity and then to help
balance that we will also drizzle in about a teaspoon of honey and I say
about a teaspoon but I'm just guessing since I'm not going to measure this I'm
just gonna drizzle a touch in and then we're also gonna want to crack in one
large egg which if you're making a video you
really hope there's some weird white thing going across the yoke so that
worked out but anyway let's go ahead and finish this up with a nice big pinch of
salt as well as a little bit of baking soda which yes classically would be
added to our dry ingredients but I just wasn't feeling very classical so I
decided to add it here and it makes absolutely no difference in this and
what we'll do is give this a very very thorough mixing with our spatula before
adding our dry ingredients or I should say dry ingredients since once this is
mixed the only thing we're gonna add is a little bit of self-rising flour and if
you don't have self-rising flour all that is is flour with a little bit of
baking powder and a little bit of salt milled into it and as usual I will give
you the formula for that on the blog so we'll go ahead and stir in just about a
quarter cup of that mixing until it just disappears but then no further and if
that didn't seem like a lot of flour it wasn't alright I don't want my o cakes
to have a bready or cakey like texture I want the inside to be nice and moist and
very oatmeal like so we are just doing the bare minimum of flour here to keep
these together and to help us form a beautiful crispy crusty surface when we
fry these in butter so we'll go ahead and stir in our flour and that's it our
batter is now officially done and at this point we have a big decision to
make we can if we want and I have cook these
immediately or we can cover in plastic and leave it on the countertop for an
hour or two or if we want we can even refrigerate this overnight and make them
the next day so how long you wait to cook these is going to be up to you
I mean you are after all the William Wallace of how long do stall this but
while you do have the freedom to wait as long as you want here's something you
should know the longer you wait to cook these the creamier the texture of the
inside will be all right if you fry these right away those little pieces of
oat are gonna retain a lot of that texture whereas if you leave these
overnight the inside will be very very soft and creamy so you may want to
experiment but generally I like to let mine sit for about an hour on the
counter before I cook them although truth be told this time I let them go a
couple hours simply because I was waiting for a little better light for
the final shots and this is what my mixture looked like right before I
headed to the stove and all I'm gonna do is use a couple big spoons to transfer
this into a skillet that's been set over medium heat it
contains a generous amount of melted butter and depending on how cold your
kitchen is or whether you refrigerated the mixture and out it may be a little
stiff by using the back of your spoons which you may want to dip into a little
bit of that melted butter you should be able to flatten these out pretty well
especially once the mixture starts to warm up in the pan
all right so I went ahead and transfer three portions in and after just a few
seconds that mixture kind of warms up and it's fairly easy to press down into
whatever thickness you want which should probably be somewhere between a quarter
and a half inch I guess that's 3/8 and what we'll want
to do is cook these for about three to four minutes per side or until they are
beautifully browned and we've achieved some significant crust af-- ocation
which we have certainly achieved here so we'll go ahead and flip those over and
give the other side three or four minutes and once these are cooked
through they should probably spring back a little bit to the touch all right they
feel kind of soft and mushy maybe let him go for another minute or two but
these were looking and feeling perfect so we'll pull those off the heat and go
ahead and plate those up and yes you do get extra credit for serving these next
to some seasonal fruit or seasonal bacon and then of course you can top these any
way you want but I'm going to be going with a little
bit of butter as well as we used to be called Grade B maple syrup but for some
reason they changed the name to robust thanks a lot Canada and I really wanted
to drizzle this on seductively but instead just ended up dripping awkwardly
but nevertheless I persisted and I eventually applied enough syrup to make
me happy or happier and that's it what I'm probably incorrectly calling
Scottish oak cakes are done and forget about how gorgeous these are or how easy
they were to make the real reason to make these is because they're absolutely
delicious with the most interesting texture contrast between that buttery
crispy crusty surface and that soft moist oatmeal like Center it really is
quite texturally addictive and don't be fooled by those crumbs here and there
which sort of kind of makes us look like it would have a texture closer to a
pancake but that is really not the case and as I mentioned earlier the reason we
didn't add a lot of flour to this okay if we want
cakes will make pancakes here I'm going for something much closer to crispy
crusty butter fried oatmeal which is basically what I accomplished so I
really do love how these come out but anyway that's it
my take on Scottie show cakes the pancake addition I was originally gonna
pitch these as a fancy Mother's Day brunch item which I still AM but above
and beyond that these are so beautiful easy and delicious why don't we put
these in the regular breakfast rotation and see what happens but either way I
really do hope you give these delicious oatmeal pancakes a try soon so head over
to food wishes calm for all the ingredient amounts and more info as
usual and as always enjoy
you