Birthday Waffles

    I'm not going to lie, I was kind of going for the "Your Mom's AWESOME!" award with this one.  My kids think I'm a dork, but hopefully I can steal some love and admiration from other peoples children.  The above picture that you are looking at is the post sleep over breakfast from the twins birthday.  I dished out what seemed like an endless supply of those bad boys.

    Rowan asked if for their sleep over breakfast they could have waffles and ice-cream.  My immediate internal answer was "NO".  On this one occasion (write it down on your calendars folks) I thought before I answered.  My knee jerk reaction was NO, but then I thought, it's one day.  No one is going to get scurvy, or malnutrition from one morning.  My answer was "I don't see why not" (you don't want to give them an enthusiastic yes, because then they will start asking for everything.)

    I own three, count them, three waffle makers.  I have my first one, which is run of the mill and quite frankly, boring.  I own a Cinderella one that makes giant waffles (and is my personal favourite), and I also own a Sesame Street one.  Why so many waffle makers you may ask.  I own three because quite frankly it makes life easier.  I quite often make huge batches of waffles on a Sunday afternoon and freeze them for the week for school morning breakfasts.  It takes no longer than toast to heat in the toaster, and the kids love them.  I normally add wheat germ, and whole wheat flour to the waffles for school mornings, but not for these birthday bad boys, oh no, it was straight up white flour.  Having three waffle makers going at the same time really cuts down on the time it takes to crank them out.

    My waffle recipe is super easy and comes from the best cookbook around, the Company's Coming Series.  I usually triple the recipe, but here it is...

1 1/2 cups of flour                                  2 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp baking powder                             1/2 tsp salt

Mix all of the dry ingredients together, and make a well in the middle.  All of these recipes call for you to do this, but to be honest, I'm a rule breaker, and I always just toss it all together.  The recipe calls for you to mix the wet ingredients separately and then pour them in the well.  I always just toss them all together, although I do mix my dry ingredients first because there is nothing worse than eating something homemade and getting that bitter bite of baking powder/ soda, it's the worst!

2 eggs beaten                                             1 1/2 cup milk

1/ 4 cup melted butter or margarine

The recipe calls for the eggs to be beaten until frothy, but again, I am super lazy and never do this.  I just add all the wet ingredients over top of the dry ones.  The key thing is not to mix the batter too much.  You want it to be "just" blended in.

    When I make waffles for the normal size waffle maker I pour in about 1/4 cup of batter into the hot waffle maker.  I have found this to be the perfect amount, after many disastrous attempts that led to a lengthly clean up of waffle batter that had run out of the sides of the waffle maker, and down the edge of the kitchen counter.

    My first choice for pancakes and waffles is corn syrup, but my family prefer maple syrup.  My first choice for maple syrup is the real stuff.  It's full of nutrients and it's natures gift.  Having said that it is labour intensive and because of that it comes with a pretty big price tag.  For that reason I generally make my own syrup for my family.  I mix 2 cups of packed brown sugar to 1 cup of water.  I let it boil for a few minutes then take it off the heat and add 2 tbsp of maple syrup extract.  It's a huge hit at our house.  They all love it warm.

    The birthday sleep over guests were pretty excited about eating waffles and ice cream for breakfast.  I have yet to recieve my "AWESOME Mom" award, but I'm sure they are just waiting for the engraving, right, right?