Blini – A Fancy Name For A Pancake

 

This is true – a blini is a fancy name for a pancake.  But what is also true is that pancakes are good for a lot more than spreading butter and smothering them with syrup.  They hold court to all kinds of tasty dishes.

I probably put more thought and more time in to the menu planning of New Year’s Eve than any other holiday.  I think this is mainly because New Year’s Eve, the event itself, is kind of long.  I mean, friends come over, and we’re together to celebrate and bring in the new year, but really the evening starts early(ish) and we’re all standing around, waiting for midnight.  There’s all this time where food needs to come into play.  Drink too….but I mainly concentrate on the food.  So naturally my food planning goes into overdrive for New Year’s Eve.

With all that, I decided that this year I wanted to vier off my usual path of a sit down dinner, and serve a plethora of hearty appetizers.  Less stress, more variety.  That is key.  So blini with smoked salmon popped into my head.

I scoured my cookbooks, and I surfed the internet.  I wanted a pretty (because really, that’s what is most important) and tasty blini that was perfectly round and had a little substance to it.  I didn’t want to make a blini that was, in my opinion, too thin.

And I thought, if the recipe included yeast and stiffly beaten egg whites, then I would get the fluffy I wanted.

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Man, was I wrong.  I followed a recipe that I found on the internet to the tee, and what I made didn’t even remotely resemble a blini.  The batter was really thick and certainly didn’t flatten down like a blini when cooked.

So I tossed that batter in the trash and sat down to think.

Then it occurred to me that I was making this waaaaaayyyy harder than it needed to be.  In short, I needed to make silver dollar sized pancakes.

So that’s what I did.  And they turned out great. Just what I had in mind.

And I will be serving these on New Year’s Eve along with some over tasty vittles…

Click here for the recipe.