ebelskievers

My father in law, Dan, has a specialty in that he makes ebelskievers on occasion.

I tried making them one morning before church thinking I could knock them out quick.

They're a pain in the ass.

Three things I learned from my experience:
1)  Do not skimp on the oil / butter / shortening that you use.  Otherwise the abelskievers will not brown properly and will stick and will drive you insane.

2)  These take a hell of a long time to make.  Do not make ebelskievers if you need to be somewhere else in the next 2.5 hours.

3)  They are worth the effort.

Here's the low-down:

Take a nice pancake batter recipe and make sure to whip the egg whites into soft peaks and fold them peaks into the batter at the very end.  I whipped my egg whites with the sugar from the recipe near the end of whipping to form a quasi-meringue texture.  This made it easier to fold the whites into the batter without deflating the egg-whites so easily.

Heat your ebelskiever pan (yeah, you gotta get some extra hardware for this.  DO NOT get that stupid "pancake-puff" pan that they advertise on TV.  That is of the devil and a perversion of what is Danish culture.  Get a cast-iron pan from Lodge Logic on amazon if  you can't find it anywhere else).  Drop a pat of butter and then a heaping tablespoon of batter into each well.  In about a minute or two you should be able to use toothpicks to rotate the little guys to brown the other side.  Give about two minutes and then remove and repeat for next batch.

These are delicious.  They're one of the first things Dan made for me when I moved here to marry his daughter.  When he cooks food for you, he does it in a way where you want to sit down and talk.  He's in a different stage of his life now and even though it's different, much of what I see now is the result of a life of struggle and rebirth in his own right.

When we're born, God walks with us through life.  For some of us, tragedy strikes and we hurt.  For some of us, God flips our lives over.  Sometimes it sucks when he flips us over because our lives spill out and you freak out because it looks like the batter of your life is getting everywhere.  But He is an expert at abelskievers and after flipping you see the deep, carmelized, crispy browning that has been happening this entire time.  Sometimes we don't always notice that deep down underneath all the chaos and emotions of our lives, we are slowly carmelizing into a brisk, sweet crunch that can only happen from patience, practice, and heat.  And after he flips, we begin to brown the next side of our lives.  


Oh yeah on a side note, these are traditionally served with a sprinkling of a special type of large-grain sugar but Dan uses powdered sugar with much success.  We dipped ours in maple syrup from www.burtonsmaplewoodfarm.com