The starter was so lusciously bubbly this morning that I couldn’t resist using it to make pancakes. We call these pancakes “Farmer Boy Pancakes” because I imagine they are a bit similar to the cakes that Almanzo’s mother made for their Sunday breakfast feasts. (At some point in the book they talk about how she kept her starter going, but I can’t find the spot now. Maybe it’s in one of Laura’s other books.)

When Almanzo trudged into the kitchen next morning with two brimming milk-pails, Mother was making stacked pancakes because this was Sunday.

The big blue platter on the stove’s hearth was full of plump sausage cakes; Eliza Jane was cutting apple pies and Alice was dishing up the oatmeal, as usual. But the little blue platter stood hot on the back of the stove, and ten stacks of pancakes rose in tall towers on it.

Ten pancakes cooked on the smoking griddle, and as fast as they were done Mother added another cake to each stack and buttered it lavishly and covered it with maple sugar. Butter and sugar melted together and soaked the fluffy pancakes and dripped all down their crisp edges.

That was stacked pancakes. Almanzo liked them better then any other kind of pancakes.

Mother kept on frying them till the others had eaten their oatmeal. She could never make too many stacked pancakes. They all ate pile after pile of them, and Almanzo was still eating when Mother pushed back her chair and said,

“Mercy on us! eight o’clock! I must fly!”

We don’t eat quite that many, though we did eat a lot this morning. I made a double batch of the following recipe, and Mr. Handsome wasn’t here and I only ate one-and-a-half pancakes and there were only three leftover. I may not have to feed my kids any lunch.

Once I bought maple sugar to better imitate Almanzo’s mother’s pancakes—I was trying to get the melted butter and sugar effect—and they were good, but too expensive and too much work. I prefer to make them big and serve them with just butter and syrup.

Farmer Boy Pancakes
Adapted from Breads from the La Brea Bakery by Nancy Silverton

2 cups white starter
2 tablespoons maple syrup
3 tablespoons canola oil
2 eggs, beaten
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder

Combine the wet ingredients and then add the dry. Heat up your griddle, grease it with some butter and proceed to fry up a big ol’ stack of pancakes.

Serve with maple syrup and butter.

Note: For how to make whole wheat Farmer Boy Pancakes, click here.

My baby lives! I am so, so happy. This has been such an emotional roller coaster: one minute I’m all excited and the next minute I’m in the depths of despair (yes, I do have a flair for the dramatic). For awhile there I was kind of resigned to the fact that I just might be a failure,but I don’t need to worry about that anymore. My baby is a bubbling, seething mass, and all is right with the world.

Now that I’m feeling more confident in my role as parent to a bread baby, it’s time to analyze the two babies and their past 18 days of life. It’s been a long process, and if you are following this, I feel that I own you a little synopsis.

Back in the day when I was a parental failure and my baby was dying, the way that I could tell my child was suffering was that the liquid would rise to the top of the mixture in a slimy wet layer. This time around, however, the liquid is absorbed into the mixture. The top gets all frothy and bubbly which is good and also very different from having puddles of liquid sitting on top.

Another clue that it is now doing well is that there are air bubbles all the way through the mixture. Yesterday they were tiny bubbles because the baby was still young, but this morning when I came downstairs I could immediately see that the bubbles were getting larger and more numerous.

Also, I can see the mark on the jar that indicates that the baby rose up and then fell back. In other words, as it ate the flour and water it became more active and bubbly, and now it’s shrinking back—the classic sign of hunger. It’s soon time for it’s breakfast.

Bread baby bubbles are beautiful and beneficial. (There’s a tongue twister for you.) They signify eating: chewing, swallowing, and burping. It’s what babies do, though I hope if you have a human baby it is not filled with as many bubbles as my bread baby. That would be rather unfortunate.

I will wait another day or two to bake (if I can stand it), just to make sure the baby is really strong.

Now I have a dilemma: What to do with Baby Number Two? I certainly don’t need another baby anymore. Chucking it seems cruel, but I think it just may be fated for the garbage.