A Very Special Treat

Our friend Sara is celebrating her birthday just now - she deserves to have at least a week of celebrations as she is the last of us to hit 'a certain age' A milestone has been reached!
One of Sara's favourite things to eat is Crispy Duck with pancakes. This is a huge favourite of Lloyd and I as well. We pretty much never have it, though - I think we've had it twice in 6 years. One of the reasons, for me, anyway, is that even though we've hunted high and low we've never managed to find the pancakes. I did look at a few recipes for them last year but thought they looked really difficult.

Anyway, Lloyd decided he'd really like to make it for Sara's birthday so I thought if he was going to do the duck ( he used THIS RECIPE and said it was brilliant - as well as the duck you also end up with lots of duck fat - MMMMmmm roast potatoes, and a lot of incredibly delicious stock for a noodle soup! Also the duck tasted pretty excellent as well)... the least I could do was try my hand at the pancakes.

I found lots of recipes and they were all pretty similar - I ended up using THIS ONE because it also had a video which was so easy to follow. I followed it to the letter and the pancakes come out beautifully.

Now, I made these the day before - and I'm glad I did, because it took me 2 hours - the only problem is that I didn't want to freeze them because we were just using them the following day, but I wasn't sure how to store them. I ended up wrapping them in a tea towel. To heat them up, we don't have a steamer, so I wrapped them in a (different) damp tea towel and sort of steamed them in the microwave. It did work, but they cooled down very quickly and as they cooled some of them went crispy, which made them a little tricky to roll. I think they were a success though. But I reckon that if you could make them on the actual day you're going to be eating them they would be better.

Anyway, here's a finished crispy pancake roll

We had all the usual trimmings - spring onions, cucumber, hoisin sauce and Lloyd made a home made plum sauce from our own plums. It was all delicious!!!