I think many will agree with me when I say that there's nothing quite like waking up to the smell of pancakes in the morning. That delicious toasty smell seems to beckon you out of bed and downstairs to the kitchen, where a hot plate of fluffy buttermilk pancakes, fresh off the griddle, waited, ready for you to slather with maple syrup and butter.
Unfortunately, when I was a kid, what I thought was the smell of pancakes cooking was usually a piece of food burning underneath the electric stove burner. I'd wake up early on a school day thinking that for some special reason my mom was making pancakes, and it turned out only to be an olfactory byproduct of boiling water for my parents' cups of Taster's Choice instant "coffee", which for some inexplicable reason they confused with real coffee for many years.
In fact, when I learned that coffee actually was made of ground up roasted beans I was pretty shocked, I tell you.
But I digress. Growing up we actually did get pancakes for breakfast, although they were usually restricted to weekend mornings. They also usually came out of a box, Bisquick being our family's baking mix of choice. These days, we usually reserve pancakes for the weekend, too. The Bisquick, however, is long gone in favor of buttermilk pancakes made from scratch. They're really not all that difficult to make, and are made up of a few things that you probably already have in your pantry. Read on, and banish the box forever.