How To... Heart Shaped Chocolate-Chip Pancakes!

I have to admit these were seemingly hard to make and I probably made it a lot more difficult for myself than I needed to but this is the step by step guide to exactly how I got the pancakes shown in the picture.

Firstly I used a basic pancake recipe from our very old and very well-used Delia Smith recipe book which requires;
*2 eggs
*A milk-water solution of 350ml of water and 250ml of semi-skimmed milk (I actually used fat free/skimmed)
*4oz of plain flour
*2 tablespoons of butter (again I used margarine - Flora light to be exact) + an extra bit for cooking the mixture
*A pinch of salt (if ya feel like it)

( I apologise for the mix of metric and imperial units there)
Basically I sieved the flour, making sure the sieve was held high so that the flour could get air easily. Then once sifted, I made a small well in the centre of the flour to crack the eggs into. Once the eggs were in, I stirred the mixture in the bowl, gradually, pouring in the milk-water solution as I was mixing. This then becomes really running once all the milk-water solution is in and looks more recognisable as pancake batter. Next, I melted the 2 tablespoons of butter in the pan and added to the mixture so it was ready to be cooked and stirred in half a bag of cooking chocolate chips (about 50g give or take). Then I got out my heart shaped metal cookie cutter and placed it in the pan and poured the batter in to it so there was a thin layer of batter covering the base of the heart shape, about 2mm thick - this is important because if it s too thin, the pancake will produce air bubbles and if it's too thin, it will burn on one side and be difficult to lip over if the batter on top is still runny. But once you feel that one side is cooked (it normally just hardens up around the edges) then flip if over, still inside the cutter and normally the pancake will just fall through the heart shape, however I had some trouble with this as the batter got stuck to the underside of the cutter but it's easy enough to just poke the pancake through so it can cook on the other side. Once done, dress with your favourite sweet things, maybe some squirty cream and chocolate sauce? But the fact that these have chocolate chips in them means you don't have to excess on those sweet accessories for your pancake!

I know I could of done some of these things a whole lot easier, for example, instead of pouring the batter into the heart, I could have literally just used the cutter to cut out heart shapes from a regular pancake. And when mixing the chocolate chips into the batter because I found that the chocolate melts and leaves on side of the pancake covered in burned chocolate and the other all neatly finished. So instead it maybe suggested that you might want to add a teaspoon of chips to the pancake once it is in the pan but it actually hasn't started cooking yet, when it's still runny.

Hope you enjoy this quick little recipe! If you like these kinds of lifestyle and cooking posts, just let me know by leaving a comment below and what kind of foods/recipes you have in mind or you would like me to show you. If you have made these sweet treats yourself and have used the alternative methods please let me know by hashtagging your photos with #cookingwithmel* on twitter and instagram!

*I use this hashtag when I show the internet what wonderful things I am cooking and it can get a bit chaotic/weird at times I apologise greatly

Thanks for reading!
Melissa xoxo