Today we have another guest post from Diana at Food n Thought Peddler. Unlike Diana, I am a morning person. It is rare that I am not awake and up before my alarm goes off as equally rare that I’m not in bed before 11PM. Take a look at Food n Thought Peddler and Diana’s post below…

I don’t know how about you, but I’m not a morning person, at all. When I was very young and had to get up early, my mom would always say “you’ll get used to it as you grow older”. Nope, mom, decades later, and I’m still not there. Maybe I should give myself another 10-20 years, right when insomnia settles in. Though knowing me, I’d probably be even grumpier, that I didn’t sleep well AND had to get up early.

Plus some people are able to get up as soon as their alarm goes off. Nope, not me. I need another 15 minutes in bed to even pry my eyes open, and then at least an hour to get ready as the first 20 minutes are usually spent on a customary morning meltdown that I had to get up in the first place. So by the time I’m finally at work and sitting down to have breakfast, a couple of hours have passed, and I’m feeling more human. Mornings really should start sometime around noon!

And I guess it’s no wonder that I happened to create a child who is not a morning person either (that on top of the usual pleasantries you’d get from a teenager), so some early weekday hours are really charged and full of sparks flying. It’s better to just spend them in silence I think, or you may lose the last drop of sanity even before the workday has begun.

Weekends then become our “moderation” days, to sleep in, have a leisurely breakfast along with some civilized conversations. Yes, it does help that it’s all happening around noon. And no matter what, a nice breakfast food is usually making its appearance to lure the sleepy teenager out of bed. The dish below has been “an eye opener” on weekend mornings these past couple of months, it’s pretty quick and fairly versatile to satisfy many moods and make any morning a good one indeed.

German Pancake “Bowls”

Makes 18 pancake bowls:

1 cup of milk (I used unsweetened almond milk)
1 cup of flour (I used Cup4Cup gluten free mix)
4 Tbspoons of butter, melted
6 eggs
1 tspoon of vanilla
1 tspoon of orange zest
1/2 tspoon of sea salt
Berries or other cut up fruit or jam
Powdered sugar and mint for garnish

Combine all ingredients except melted butter in a blender gradually adding flour to make sure that no clumps are left. Then blend in butter a little at a time to temper the eggs. The mix will resemble a bit thinner pancake batter.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter the muffin pans really well to make sure the pancakes won’t stick, fill them just about half full.

Bake for about 15 minutes or until the tops are golden and look puffy. Once you remove them from the oven, they deflate a bit or you can gently push the tops in to make them look like a bowl.

Remove them from the pans and fill in with berries, cut up fruit or jam, sprinkle with powdered sugar and garnish with chopped mint leaves.
And you can play with other possible toppings since the pancakes are not sweet, like chopped tomato and bacon crumble topped with shredded mozzarella or salmon roe and scallions.

And since the pancakes are kind of hollow inside and resemble cream puffs, I think it’d be fun to inject them with jelly or the actual cream. That could be my next morning project!