Pancake day!

Today I found myself on Facebook, as I often do, while procrastinating and watching Olympic curling. I noticed that a lot of people were posting messages about pancakes, more specifically, about pancake day. I had never heard of this, but it sounded like a delicious idea. Wikipedia informed me that what these people were talking about was "Shrove Tuesday", aka Fat Tuesday, aka Mardi Gras. It's the day before Ash Wednesday, which I can only assume is a day created to celebrate my birth, since I was born on a Wednesday, and my name is Ashley, but they seem to have their seasons all wrong.

Evidently in the UK, and by extension Canada and our other commonwealth cousins, celebrate Shrove Tuesday by eating pancakes. How, in 26 years of life, I had never heard of pancake day is beyond me. I'm no fan of religion, but when it involves an excuse to eat pancakes for dinner, you're darn tootin' I'll be jumping on that bandwagon!

I had pancakes just a few days ago for breakfast, so I needed to do something extra special to celebrate the day before my holiday. In my research on this flap jackin' holiday, I learned that in Sweden they celebrate by eating a pastry called "semla" which is a decadent little pastry bun filled with almond paste and whipped cream. This sounded pretty awesome and I wondered if there was some kind of almond based vegan whipped cream. Instead, I came across this recipe for vegan whipped cream, which would be more appropriately named whipped coconut cream. Sold. I made this recipe and added a spash of almond extract and vanilla extract to give it a little extra somethin'.

This whipped coconut cream was HEAVEN! It had a decadent fresh coconut taste and just the right stiffness. Unlike the recipe said I only left the cans of coconut milk in the fridge for about 2 hours, and whipped it using a chilled metal bowl and beaters and it came out perfectly. It also stood up well to the heat of the pancakes, better than real whipped cream I'd say. It might not be your first choice on a hot summer day, but it served me well today.

I served this whip on a stack of pancakes with lots of sliced banana, which made for a fresh tropical taste. I also made a side of Yves veggie breakfast links since pancakes aren't the most nutritious of foods. I was pleasantly surprised, they were quite tasty! I had tried Yves veggie bacon before and wasn't overly impressed, but I would buy these sausages again. Even my mom, who fears fake meats of all kinds, said they weren't bad.

Then I celebrated Ash Wednesday by eating leftover pancakes this morning with strawberries and coconut whip! MMmmmmm..... And as you can see it kept well in the fridge overnight, came out exactly as it was when I put it in last night.