Breakfast for a Chilly Saturday: Pannukakku (Baked Pancake)

Does Fall unleash your inner chef? I love baking and cooking year-round, but Fall is when I wake up giddy thinking about what to make that day. It's when I pore over cookbooks and recipes in magazines. It's when I make soups and stews and roast chicken on Sunday afternoons. (Tomorrow afternoon will be pork chops with cabbage and apples and roasted beet salad with gorgonzola.)

This morning, I wanted to make something hearty for breakfast. I also wanted to use up some eggs because we had 13 eggs in the fridge, with a half-dozen more coming on Wednesday with my weekly Boston Organics delivery.

I've stumbled across a few blogs recently focusing on Swedish and Scandinavian design (check out red.house and My Scandinavian Retreat for some amazing photographs and ideas) and, besides making me want to hop on a plane to Sweden and then completely redecorate my house starting first by painting all the walls white, they have made me hungry for Scandinavian foods.

So, on this chilly morning with eggs to use and a lonely oven, I dug into my Swedish cookbooks and decided on this one:

The Great Scandinavian Baking Book by Beatrice Ojakangas

I found the perfect recipe: Baked Pancake (Pannukakku), which the book says is popular in all of Scandinavia. It was so easy to make - a bunch of eggs, flour, milk, and a touch of sugar and salt. (If you want the detailed recipe, let me know!)

Whisk everything together and then let the batter rest for half an hour, though I wasn't quite that patient.

The recipe called for melting basically an entire stick of butter in the pan in the preheating oven. I did that, but next time I'll probably use half that or less. We ended up with puddles of butter on top of the pancake - glorious, but my body isn't used to that much fat in the morning anymore and the extra fat didn't help much with the pancake sticking to the pan, so it seemed unnecessary. (That may be the first time in my life that I've referred to butter as unnecessary.)

Coat the pan with the melted butter, then pour in the batter, and bake at 450 for 15-20 minutes.

Beautiful, huge golden pancake with butter pools. Look at those lovely crisp peaks around the edges!

I served it with strawberries, blackberries, and homemade whipped cream. The pancake was wonderfully eggy and slightly sweet.

Velvety, decadent breakfast - perfect for a chilly Fall morning.

A and I devoured half of it, R tried a few bites (he liked the crunchy edges best), and I saved the rest for tomorrow. I'm hoping it reheats well.

This was definitely a special occasion breakfast for us. (It would be perfect for Christmas morning.) It was much richer and sweeter than our everyday breakfast. But we enjoyed it very much, and all those eggs gave us the protein we needed later in the day to make it through the huge corn maze at Connors Farm!

Next up in my Scandinavian cooking adventures: Swedish oat cookies and coffee bread

What are you making or craving this Fall?