SWEET SUNDAY: RICOTTA PANCAKES

Sundays during the summertime are the best. You get to wake up as late as you want, eat breakfast food for lunch, and take it easy. The day just seems to go by slower in the best possible way. So to start off the day I made Ricotta Pancakes. 

I got the recipe from Gabriele Corcos and Debi Mazar's new cookbook, Extra Virgin: Recipes and Love from Our Tuscan Kitchen. Gorgeous cookbook by two of my favorite and inspiring people. 

I was looking forward to trying something different since the pancakes I've always had come from a recipe my mom got from my grandma. Which by the way are delicious! but I was curious to see how the ricotta cheese would change the taste. This was my first time making pancakes so I messed up horribly on the first four but I finally got the timing and heat setting right. These are incredibly light, not overly sweet, and the ricotta gives it a lovely creamy texture. They are even great cold! I skipped on the extra butter and ate them with a bit of maple syrup. Amazing. 

*It would feel wrong to post the recipe straight from the cookbook which is why I haven't included it in this post. I'm still looking into copyright rules to see how it all works, but for the exact recipe I would highly suggest getting the wonderful cookbook or searching ricotta pancakes on google to find similar recipes*

SWEET SUNDAY: CLASSIC BRITISH SCONES

One thing you should know about me is that I have such love for all things British. I spend a lot of time reading and researching on British history, society, and pop culture. I find it fascinating. Youtube and blogging has only further fueled this obsession since most of the people I follow are from all parts of the UK. Unfortunately, since I won't be visiting anytime soon I figured I would attempt to make these quintessential British scones to hold me over until I can make the trip over.

I made these scones using a recipe from BBC Good Food. There are tons of recipes online but I went with a BBC one because...I don't know, it's the BBC! It just made sense to me. So the recipe required all staple ingredients that I already had, but the clotted cream was extremely difficult to find. I'm not alone on this as most people writing about it from the U.S. said it isn't readily available in American stores. But, I finally found some clotted cream and devon cream at World Market. Thank god for World Market that store is amazing and it's one of my favorites. While I was there I also saw Pg tips, digestive biscuits, and marmite, oh and this weird thing called spotted dick, my mom and I had a laugh at that (clearly we're immature). Anyway with as many times as I've been in that store I don't know how I hadn't seen these things before! I definitely got wayyy too excited -Mom was giving me weird looks.

Anyway, so after buying the cream I made them the next morning. I spent way too much time doing some conversions from metric (math has never been my strong suit) but they finally came out! Verdict: they were so good, I mean really good. They were a hit! I've since made them three times and with each try they seem to come out better and taller. I'm learning not to flatten the dough out too much, the taller the better apparently.

Overall, it's such a quick and easy recipe to make that I think I'll be making them for my grandparents during Easter weekend. They probably wouldn't stand a chance compared to the ones baked in the UK but I hope this American did them justice!