Shredded Pear Pancakes with Cinnamon Ricotta

Good morning! Saturday is here! It’s breakfast time! The most important meal of the day! Gather your housemates! Find a small dog! Walk down the street together and laugh merrily! Take a seat at the newest and trendiest of cafés! Quinoa muesli! Poached eggs! Stuff served with some sort of compote! Coffee made with Bonsoy! YEAH!

This used to be my life before beginning the very rewarding, yet arduous task, of enrolling into uni in my early 20s. After around a year and a half of full-time study I lost my part-time office job to restructuring, or whatever, and was left very, very unemployed. I did a few odd jobs around town, I worked at a restaurant for a little while but eventually I could barely keep my head above the financial waters that surround the inner-west lifestyle (and by ‘lifestyle’ I mean ‘rent’). The whole living-on-mi-goreng gag is funny when you actually can afford a little more but is hideously heart-wrenching as a blaring truth. Noodles, and the occasional avocado, made up a lot of my dinners when I was sensible enough to no longer throw down my debt ridden credit card and unfortunately living in such a sweet area was no longer sustainable. I said goodbye to my enormous rent which was good but saying goodbye to local friends, good eats and good coffee was not.

So, when I’m away from Sydney’s inner-west I like to pretend I’m still enjoying the good life by making a café brunch of my own. It’s so easy! And here’s one of them.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mum making pancakes and some of my earliest memories are of my dad are pouring honey onto anything he could find, including ricotta-slathered pieces of toast. I like my pancakes phat with shredded fruit so consider this brunch dish an homage to my family of sorts. You can keep it innocent if you wish and use this post simply as a damn good pancake recipe. If you want to lose the pear try reducing the amount of flour to only one cup. If you want to lose the ricotta and honey then, uhh, I don’t want to know about it. Let’s get some ~food porn~ close up action happening.

Without further hesitation here’s the recipe for what I like to think of a near perfect breakfast/brunch dripping with re-worked nostalgia from a time where I was barely tall enough to even reach the stovetop. I would happily serve in my hypothetical inner-west cafe (it will happen one day). No gram measurements today because this recipe is far easier to remember in simple cups, and who even wants to pull out their scales that early in the morning? Not I, not I.

Shredded Pear Pancakes with Cinnamon Ricotta
(an original recipe to make around 24 pancakes)

Pancake batter
3 cups flour
1 1/2 cup milk
1 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
2 pears, grated
Butter, for greasing

Cinnamon ricotta
300g (just over a cup) fresh ricotta
Cinnamon, to taste

1. Combine all pancake batter ingredients in a bowl and whisk well. Allow to stand at room temperature for 30 minutes.
2. Lightly grease a pan with butter and place on medium heat. Ladle the pancake batter in rounds and cook for 1-2 minutes on each side or until the surface begins to bubble and the edges have browned nicely.
3. Combine ricotta and cinnamon (around 2 tsp) well. Serve atop or beside pancakes with a generous drizzling of honey or syrup.