Mango Pancakes - it's raining Mangoes!

A Double Post... coz I am finally back - was feeling really lost without my laptop and have been waiting to blog for the last few days...

Summer is here and there is an abundance of fruit everywhere. India is known for it's yummilicious mangoes in the summer and you have over a 100 varieties available in the country. If I am obsessed about baking and cooking with strawberries my love for Mangoes cannot be left far behind. I have grown up on  staple diet of luscious orangey Alphonso Mangoes and just can't resist picking up some when I am at a fruit vendors. Previously, I did the following Mango posts Mango Cream Cake , Mango Shrikhand,  Mango Yogurt Mousse , Mango Panna , Mangoes & Cream Ice cream .

Now, I landed up with a batch of not so sweet mangoes and wanted to do something different with them... the morning was rainy, I had my cuppa coffee in my hand and was standing in the balcony (Delhi / Gurgaon has been having weird weather the past week), reminiscing about similar weather in Koh Samui a couple of years back and how I was stuffing my face with some Mango Pancakes. Now, I could really stuff a number of panckes into my mouth at that time 'coz I was a couple of months pregnant and that totally gave me the license to eat my heart out!

Anyways, coming back to the pancakes... I wanted to put together something easy in a jiffy with the ingredients I had on hand and was googling around for an easy recipe but didn't find any so put together mine after reading a ton of them!

Ingredients:

1 up all purpose flour

3/4 cup milk & a little more incase your batter lacks the consistency of regular pancakes

1 egg

1/2 tsp baking soda

3 tablespoons brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 mango chopped into small bite sized pieces

I mixed all the ingredients, except the mangoes, for the pancake batter and let it sit on the counter for a couple about 30 minutes. As you can see from my pictures my mangoes pieces were chunks rather than bite sized and I added them to the batter when I poured it into my non-stick. The flavour was yummy! I sprinkled some powdered sugar on them and enjoyed them with a bit of honey but the rest of the family doused them with the eternal favorite Maple Syrup. I am guessing mango essence instead of vanilla essence can also be tried but they had a pretty nice mango-ey flavor to them!

I also wanted to submit this post for Healing Foods - Mango being hosted this month by the talented Reva from Kaarasaaram. Healing Food is the brain child of Cooking with Siri - a young working girl and part-time blogger! She has an amazing collection of recipes and better pictures to match so do hop on over to her blog to catch up on some great recipes.

I am so happy with the feedback that I have received for this recipe... that it has literally left me beaming! I am going to submit this post to the Breakfast Club. Krithi from http://krithiskitchen.blogspot.com
 has been kind enough to let me submit this post to the Breakfast Club #10 that she is guest hosting. It is originally hosted by  Helen from  Fuss Free Flavours, both really great blogs that I have discovered! I am so glad to be able to discover such great blogs with awesome recipes and pictures!

Dorie's Salted Butter Break-Ups

Ever since I have set my eyes on these cookies on Purplefoodie's blog I haven't been able to keep my mind off these. I have been dreaming about these with my eyes open and sometimes I feel I can just taste them but haven't had the chance to make them!

Now, I have to usually get books shipped to India which becomes way to expensive and so I don't know a lot of cookbooks that I would love to - I have added Dorie's Around the French Table to it obviously... also, with her recipes you don't seem to go wrong and they somehow come together perfectly and all the ingredients complement each other to form some of the tastiest of treats!

Now, like I mentioned I have read the recipes a couple of times but haven't been able to get my hands on "fleur de sel" and have been on the look out for it for a long time... I thought that it would have added the extra bit of zing to my recipe but since I haven't been able to find it - I had to settle for baking it with regular salt and they were I must say scrumptious and once you started eating them you couldn't put them down!

It was a weekend and I hadn't been able to get much sleep as my toddler who is still sleeping with us kept kicking me all night and I could hear some loud blaring truck horns on the road (yeah, thats what you get for living face the Gurgaon-Faridabad highway). So I got up at around 4am to make the dough and at about 6am to bake it. By the time my help was in making my morning coffee the house was smelling full of scrumptious (yes, I am using it again to describe these) biscuits and my son literally followed his nose to the kitchen.

Once you get your hands on this recipe - you should go give it a try and not even think about waiting for any extra days or leaving it on the backburner... all the ingredients are most definitely going to be in your pantry - tea time will be a treat, your kids will love it and coffee breaks will be a delight. So go ahead and try it.

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour (I added 1/2 cup whole wheat flour)
2/3 cup castor sugar
9 tbsp cold butter
3-5 tbsp cold water
2 tsp salt (I didn't have fleur de sel) and more for sprinkling

Glaze:
Egg yolk with water - but i used fresh cream

Recipe:
Put the flour, sugar and salt in a bowl and give it a quick mix.

Add the butter and start rubbing it in the dry ingredients till it forms coarse pieces - pea sized and bigger is fine.

Now add some cold water and start getting the dough together to form a ball. (I had a very soft dough even after chilling - maybe coz I did it with my hands). Wrap the dough in plastic and let it chill for an hour.

 Preheat the oven to 350F/ 170C.

Remove the dough and roll it out with a rolling pin into a rectangle. She has recommended putting a criss cross pattern with your fork on it but mine was too soft to get a pattern - so I just put a glaze. Also I rolled it in two of my fluted pastry tins so it got a nice pattern around the edges which was later hardly seen.

I then baked it in the oven for about 40 minutes and they were more golden than they should have been - I guess I should have pulled them out a little earlier.

I liked mine really crisp but they were buttery and soft inside and I cut them into triangles and they were perfect with my morning cuppa and a magazine on a lazy Sunday morning...