My grandmother was an excellent cook. In her last years, she struggled with MS. That means that many of us grandkids didn’t get to eat her cooking, but she left behind a veritable treasure trove of amazing recipes. This fluffy German pancake recipe is one of them. It’s a family favorite, and for good reason.

Can you see the pool of butter in the center there? This recipe combines the best of so many worlds – light and fluffy texture, with decadently rich flavor. This is the sort of special celebratory breakfast my family would eat on Christmas morning. It’s even easy on the cook. There are literally just two steps and only a few ingredients, so you can have a delicious meal and whoever got the cooking job has basically no stress. I like this. I like this a lot. (Guess who gets the cooking job in this house!)

I can’t say I always enjoyed this. When I was really little (like three), I used to refuse to eat this. What was I thinking? Who knows – not me! Anyway, my ingenious mother waited a bit, then reintroduced this food as the new and improved “French pancakes” (not to be confused with crepes). They were different, she told me, and they were Belle’s favorite food. That was something I couldn’t argue with. Belle was arguably the most important influence in my life at that time, so I had to love these new French pancakes. I ate them happily without realizing I’d been conned for the next seven years. That was also when I discovered that Ariel doesn’t really love Chicken of the Sea tuna. Also, did you know there’s no such thing as clear flavored popsicles? Yeah, that would ice on a stick. My mom had quite the imagination.