The Cocktail Cookbook: Crêpes Chartreuse

A pancake day special + An amazing competition

EVERY day is pancake day in my house. Well not quite every day - I am not insane - but I do make a lot of pancakes. Not because I am particularly partial to pancakes, mind; I mean I like them but let’s not go crazy. I make them because I like making them. Even if I’m not consuming them. Same with cocktails, come to think of it. The ritual is the thing.

If I am up slightly ahead of the beat of the house on a Saturday morning, I like to mooch down to the kitchen, put on a good album, make coffee, clear the detritus from the night before and set about cracking eggs and sifting flour. If I manage to do this before the downstairs fills up, the weekend will be a good one. Everyone is happy when there are pancakes. And eggs and bacon and maple syrup and bananas and Greek yoghurt and various palm-oil based spreads and the ingredients for crêpes Suzette - but mostly pancakes. Pancake batter is a handy thing to have around, too. It can be turned into lunch quite easily - cook one side of the pancake, flip, grate cheese, fold, flash fry each half until melted, serve with a crisp salad with a punchy vinaigrette and some toasted walnuts. Pancakes are great vehicles for snack solos, too.

And they can be filled with Chartreuse-soaked buttercream, set on fire and be consumed as dessert. Because when every day is pancake day, you need to do something quite special for actual pancake day.

The recipe for this amazing dish is below the line. But first, on the subject of Chartreuse…

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✨WELCOME TO THE SPIRITS✨
The neighbourhood bar of the internet

There is an amazing competition over at the SPIRITS STORE this month. The prize is a 1-litre bottle of CHARTREUSE V.E.P., the ultra-limited edition, premium-aged version of green Chartreuse which is almost impossible to find unless you’re on extremely good terms with one of the seven Carthusian monks who makes it. It was last seen in the UK retailing at £575, it is probably too good for pancakes and - honestly, given the global Chartreuse drought, there are few more covetable bottles. To enter all you need to do is buy something from the store in the month of March. Each bottle purchased counts as an entry.

I also PERSONALLY have an extremely exciting Chartreuse-related prize to hand out to a lucky Spirits subscriber this month… details of this competition to follow later in the week. But in the meantime you might like to revisit my original Chartreuse post, unravelling the mysteries of the greatest of all liqueurs.

The Cabinet: Green Chartreuse

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HOW TO MAKE REALLY GOOD PANCAKES