Puffed Oven Pancake

I've been making Puffed Oven Pancake as a weekend breakfast for years.  It's easy. It's child-friendly, It's delicious. It has no added sugar.  Most of the ingredients can be locally sourced.

Once when one of my husband's aunts asked him if I was a gourmet cook, he mentioned puffed oven pancake as an example of my culinary acumen. I was surprised.  A puffed oven pancake takes 1/2 an hour to make. This was the same week that I made a daffodil cake, which was also delicious and took several hours. This recipe is so simple it is almost cheating.

Puffed Oven Pancake

Ingredients

4 eggs
1 cup flour (any kind you like. I've used white, wheat, gluten free, and even rolled oats)
1 cup milk (dairy, or whatever non-dairy milk product you like)
3 Tbs butter (I have successfully substituted coconut oil)
1 or 2 apples sliced
cinnamon

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 450.
2. Melt the butter in a 10" iron skillet in the pre-heating oven.
3. While the butter is melting, put the eggs in a blender and blend at high speed for 2 minutes.
4. Add the milk and flour to the blender and blend for another minute.
5. Arrange the apples in the butter in the bottom of the hot skillet.
6. Pour the batter over the apples. Sprinkle with cinnamon.
7. Bake for 10 minutes.
8. Reduce the temperature to 350, and bake for another 10 minutes, until puffy and golden brown.

I was out of apples, the other day, and used frozen blueberries, sliced frozen strawberries, and sliced bananas.  It was delicious.  I've been meaning to try peaches, but oven season and peach season don't overlap much.

When the kids got a little older, I used 6 eggs, 1.5 cups milk and 1.5 flour.  That worked well, but the apples floated around in the batter, and it was a little harder to get it to look symmetrical.