Ricotta and coconut flatcakes with banana and honey

I bought ricotta yesterday and this morning I woke up wanting to eat banana and ricotta hotcakes. I was fairly sure that I had a recipe somewhere and dug up Ginger and ricotta flatcakes with fresh honeycomb out of home food by Murdoch Books. The recipe required me to separate the eggs and beat up the eggs whites, which sounds like too much effort on a Sunday morning, so normally I would avoid it and try something simpler. I was eager enough for the flatcakes though so I persevered!

I decided to halve the recipe though as it was only me eating - the original served four! There was a minor setback though - halfway through pouring the wet ingredients into the dry I realised why it seemed like there was too much - I had forgotten to halve the amount of milk. Oops. I ended up adding more flour and ground ginger to compensate.

Here is the recipe, with correct proportions.

1/2 cup (75g) wholemeal plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 tablespoon caster sugar
1/2 cup dessicated coconut
2 eggs, separated
250g ricotta cheese
165mL milk
2 bananans, sliced
yummy honey (unprocessed)

Sift the flour, baking powder, ginger and caster sugar into a medium bowl. Stir in the coconut, then mix in the combined egg yolks, milk and 175g of the ricotta cheese. Mix until smooth

Beat the eggs whites to soft peaks, then fold into the pancake mixture.

Heat your preferred pancake cooking pan over a low heat. Grease with butter. Pour 1/4 cup of batter onto the pan. Cook until bubbles form on the surface of the hotcake. Flip and cook the other side. Keep going until you run out of batter!

Stack three pancakes onto a plate and top with ricotta and sliced banana; drizzle over with honey and serve. Eat fresh and hot and enjoy!

Notes

• the recipe calls for flaked coconut (toasted) but I only had desiccated


• the honey that I used is White Gum from The House of Honey. They had a stall at the WA Pavillion at the Royal Show this year and E and I sampled their wares. I like to buy local and unprocessed honey. The different flavours are fantastic too - so much more interesting than the bland processed squeezy jar stuff you can get at the supermarket.
  

New food processor

I finally committed myself to a new food processor! I am very excited. It will replace Mum's Breville Beast that I have been borrowing for the last few years.

What I am getting is a black Kitchenaid Food Processor. It comes with three different sized bowls and a few different blades. I think that there will be more than enough to keep me occupied and out of trouble for a while!!

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Nigella's breakast bars

I finally got around to making Nigella's Breakfast Bars. I have been eyeing them off for some months now and have had all of the ingredients to make them cluttering up the pantry.

I did make a few adjustments, although I kept the proportions of ingredients the same.

395g tin condensed milk
250g rolled oats
75g desiccated coconut
100g dried dates
125g mixed seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, sesame)
125g walnuts and almonds

Preheat the oven to 130C. Grease and line a 23 x 33 x 4cm baking tray.

Warm the condensed milk in a small pan. Mix the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl and add the warmed condensed milk.

Spread the mixture into the tray and smooth the surface.

Bake for an hour. Remove from the oven and sit for 15 minutes. Cut into bars.

Notes
- Next time I need to cook the bars for longer. The tops seemd cooked but the bottoms were still rather sticky.
- Yum! The three ingredients that I most notice are the dates, the sesame seeds and the condensed milk, and not necessarily in that order.