Griddle Pan Waffles with Chocolate Sauce

When Cupcake and I were watching the Jamie Oliver's Family Christmas cooking show (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/jamies-family-christmas) at home in the UK, we were totally drooling over the waffles that Jamie made and servied with chocolate sauce.

Here is the the recipe here:
Ingredients:2 eggs
300ml milk
100g butter, melted
2.5 tablespoons baking powder
225g self-raising flour
1/4 tsp salt

Method
1. Whisk the eggs and the milk together, then add the salt and the baking powder. Sieve in the flour and whisk. Expect the mixture to be thick. Dribble in the butter in stages. Rest for 30 minutes, or overnight.

2. Heat the griddle pan until very hot and melt some butter in the pan. You don't need lots of butter as thre is already butter in the batter. ('Butter in the batter', I like that ...) Pour in the batter, then turn the heat down to medium and cook for 8 to 10 minutes. Yes, really for 8-10 minutes.  Cook the other side for about another eight minutes. Otherwise, the middle will be raw ! You might need to chop the thing in half to be able to flip it. It's a beast ! See below for more on this.

Our house in France is in a small village, we have a stone wall that we had restored in the living area. The living area is on the first floor, rather than the ground floor and so it has a great vista over the village and the church. Actually, I bought the house for the view out of the window. At the time, if I had looked behind me into the house, I doubt we would have bought it! Pretty, it was not. I could just see us eating these waffles from the grill in our pretty little room on New Year's day. The image in my head totally matched how it was. Perfect.

Like most people, we enjoy a little tipple on New Year's Eve, so I thought the waffle/pancake would also be some great stodge for New Year's day.

Instead of the chocolate sauce that Jamie uses, we did a basic chocolate and double cream mix, using some cream that I had left over from a trifle I had made for the evening before..

Here's the recipe for it:

Quick Chocolate sauce
Serves 4
100gr chocolate
200ml double cream
2 tsp (vanilla) sugar

Method
1. Stir the sugar into the cream.
2. Melt the chocolate
3. Add the cream to the chocolate and heat gently and stir until it is mixed into a lovely sauce.
4. If you wanted to add a dash of something, you could add Cointreau for an orangey element, or Tia Maria for a coffee element. With the rich pancake we didn't add any liqueur.

The batter recipe is a standard batter recipe. It has no sugar in it, which is good as you don't need the added sugar with the rich chocolate sauce. I did prepare a plate of sugar to roll the griddled pancake in, a little like a doughnut. We also had a dash of lemon on the side to cut through the richness. I'm not sure if I enjoyed the lemon and sugar more, or the chocolate. Being the glutton I am, I can say I really like both.

Making the waffle in a griddle pan, makes it impossible to toss - for me anyway. So, I chopped the thing in half and tossed one half first, and then the other and it worked great. Once cooked, I cut it into strips, following the grooves made by the griddle.And we dipped and munched.

See the picture below. I love the marks made by the griddle pan.

This was the first time I have used the griddle pan shown above - I've since silently and secretly decided that I am going to use this pan for nothing except this recipe. Imagine that ! How decadent and indulgent am I ??
And then feeling rather full, we went for a three hour walk in the hills. Happy New Year!