Breakfast of Chumpions

That would have been Breakfast of Champions, but I was making it. And I don't really learn from past mistakes. I made my vegan pancakes again to round out a breakfast of drip and a shortbread cookie, to see if I had in fact ruined the cookies. Rewind - I made shortbread cookies last night. It was late, I was tired, and I wasn't too patient. I didn't properly cream the butter and sugar before adding flour, I didn't roll the dough out thin enough, and I didn't pre-cut the cookies deep enough. Oh, I also put on too much salt/not enough chocolate. They still taste good, but are not pretty.

Back to the pancakes: I scaled it down from 1/2 cup flour to 1/3 cup flour (so 1/3 cup milk, etc). I used spelt flour this time, so they look much more like pancakes and act much more like pancakes than the buckwheat version. The one thing I forgot to scale - the banana. I still put in half, and of a large one at that. Looking at them, you would think them a delicious and beautiful specimen of veganus pancakinar. You would be right - just a mushy one. They look cooked, but when the batter is about 1/3 or so banana, you can't really cook something through. Lesson learned: less banana in the batter.

Also, I got semolina flour so I went right into cooking with it. The recipe I want to cook needs 3 nights, and I wanted the bread for the next day, so I scrapped it. I did my standard mini baguettes (a very liquid dough) and replaced a full 50% of the flour (by weight) with semolina flour. The dough took forever to firm up - not until the 3rd stretch and fold (of 4) was I really doing much besides letting it ooze, and that was after giving it an extra 10 minutes to hydrate. If doing a similar substitution, you should probably do a soak before adding the yeast and moving on to stretching (that is, combine the flour and water, stir, and let it sit for 20 minutes or so before moving on with the recipe). Also dill in bread is pretty gross when you put in as much as I did, so don't put in as much as I did. Luckily I didn't measure at all so I'm free to repeat my mistakes in the future. Go me!