Yellow Negg Pancakes

     The tradition began on his first birthday, way back in Year Thirteen. Someone had given me a used recipe book in the Month of Giving prior — I know, a used gift, how gauche. But I’m a classy broad, I said thank you and cherished it as though it came straight from Booktastic’s even though it clearly had not. I have to give credit where credit is due, it was a good recipe book. Alongside the pancakes its contents make up much of my culinary repertoire to this day. The Neggbrosia Salad has made me the star of many dinner parties and don’t get me started on the Neggdrop Soup. I digress, this is about the pancakes.

     I’d been wanting to test out the Yellow Negg Pancake recipe since I got the book, and I figured a birthday is as good an occasion as any. Especially Kneezles’ birthday. Kneezles is my pride and joy, he’s my only pet and we do everything together. We wake early and tend to our Negg farm together, we do the weekly shopping in town together, we play Cheat! together. You get it, he’s special. He deserved the best on his first birthday, and the best is pancakes.

     The recipe was actually quite finicky. First of all, the ingredients must be room temperature. Seems easy enough, put the eggs and the buttermilk on the counter for a few hours right? Wrong. This is rural Altador in the Month of Swimming, my friends. There is no room temperature here, only sweltering heat and blistering humidity. To achieve room temperature is a constant dance between cooling and resting, and resting and cooling, and testing the ingredients with your finger to ensure they’re perfect. It’s a workout, for your feet and your tastebuds. Like I said, Kneezles is worth it.

     My first attempt took several hours. I woke well before the sun, closer to my bedtime really than the morning, but I wanted everything to be perfect for my special guy’s first birthday. I wanted him to wake to the intoxicating aroma of freshly baked pancakes, that sweet blend of caramelised sugar and vanilla. I wanted him to come down to the largest stack of Yellow Negg Pancakes he’d ever seen, stacked so high and smelling so good that he was more interested in them than the ornately wrapped gift I placed next to them.

     The gift was perfection, too. I got him a gorgeous vintage style — but brand new I assure you — Scorchio Plushie whom he promptly named Kuhali. He loved that plushie, let me tell you. The boy took that thing everywhere with him. That is until we lost it at the annual Negg Farmer Association’s Summer Picnic and I spent the better part of the next few years looking for it everywhere. Again, another story for another day, this is about pancakes.

     Reader, when I tell you I achieved perfection on that morning, I am telling you that with my whole entire chest. Nothing brings a Neopian more joy than spoiling their Neopets on their birthdays and spoil him, I did. I was unsuccessful at making pancakes more appealing than presents, I will admit, but once the gifts had been gifted and Kuhali had been adequately snuggled, breakfast had his full and undivided attention.

     I had, as mentioned, stacked his Yellow Negg Pancakes so high he could not see over them. Given, he was much smaller back then and I had not realised I had set myself up for a challenge that would increase exponentially in the years to come. Atop the stack I had sprinkled a generous helping of icing sugar, made from last winter’s Candy Cane Negg crop so it had just the right amount of minty kick to it to balance the decadence and sweetness. Not that there’s such a thing as too sweet for a one year old Baby Aisha, but I did try to foster a sophisticated palette in Kneezles. And of course, just for today, he could add as much Maple Negg Syrup as his one year old heart desired. We’d run off the sugar high at his party later.

     I’d never seen a stack of pancakes inhaled at such velocity as I witnessed on that day, and I haven’t seen it replicated since. The first two pancakes were gone before I had even blinked, as though he’d slurped them through a straw and not his unhinged jaw. The next two went almost as quickly. Then, because Kneezles is truly a beacon of light in an ever greying world, he turned and offered me a pancake right off his plate. Touched by what an upstanding citizen I had somehow managed to raise, I grabbed myself a plate and the two of us shared what remained of the stack.

     “That was the best breakfast I’ve ever had,” Kneezles said, pausing the licking of his plate that had ensued once the pancakes were finished. “Can we do this every year?”

     “We sure can, bud.” I replied.

     And do it every year, we did. Every year I get up before the sun and whip up his favourite Yellow Negg Pancake recipe from scratch, using ingredients fresh from our farm. I have to keep the cakes themselves true to the recipe, per Kneezles’ instructions. He says this is the absolute best Yellow Negg Pancake recipe to ever be written and I am not to even attempt to improve on perfection. So instead, I’d mix it up by moulding them into different shapes each year, or stacking them on a three tiered cake tray instead of a plate, or I’d pull out the fancy dishes and put the Maple Negg syrup in our finest gravy dish for a bit of flair. Kneezles loves it, he thinks I add these little touches to keep things feeling fresh.

     But the truth is I lost the recipe book ages ago and have been making it up ever since.

     Here’s what I do know was in it: Yellow Negg flour. Duh. It would be pretty ridiculous if a dish called Yellow Negg Pancakes didn’t have Yellow Neggs in it. Worse than ridiculous, actually, it would be downright dishonest. And while I may not be the most prolific baker, I am an honest one. Yellow Neggs, as everyone knows, are a late summer harvest and while they’re trickier to grow than your standard Negg or Purple Negg, they’re profoundly sweeter and make for an ultra-fine flour when milled.

     The recipe had eggs, buttermilk, and sugar of course — standard pancake ingredients. I know it had cinnamon but I think it had nutmeg as well, anyways it’s had nutmeg for the past eight years at least. Vanilla was definitely in there, but in what quantities I couldn’t tell you. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. I go off my memory of what I remember the recipe to be as best as I can, but the measurements grow muddier each year.

     This year Kneezles turned fifteen — I know, I haven’t fully processed or accepted that myself. I figured it was time to finally come clean and tell him the truth about the pancakes. I waited until he’d finished his first two, and as has become tradition by now, offered to share the remainder of the stack with me. When I had taken a few mouthfuls, I told him everything.

     To my surprise, his response was laughter. He actually laughed out loud when I told him I’d lost his favourite recipe, the one he insisted I follow to the letter each year, and had been serving him up a stack of deception ever since.

     “I know that,” he said in between giggles, “You lent that recipe book to Maeverry down the road when I was four and she never returned it. You complained about it for months.”

     I was flabbergasted. No, that’s not a strong enough word. I was transformed in the deepest depths of my soul by this revelation that Kneezles had known about my scheming this entire time. But then, of course he did. Kneezles is the smartest guy I know, he’s a down right genius. Isn’t that what I was always telling his Neoschool teachers when they deigned to give him the grades he deserved? Why on Neopia was I shocked that such a clever lad had me figured out? It was silly, really.

     “Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked, my shock giving way to complete and utter awe.

     “Because,” he said, pausing to scoop another forkful of pancake into his mouth. “It’s our thing. I don’t care about the recipe—“

     “—But you said—“

     “—I know,” he cut me off. “Ok you want to know the truth? I knew you had forgotten about the book you lent and I wanted to see what you’d do when you realised. Then you just kind of… went with it and it was so much fun to see you improvise every year that I couldn’t tell you I knew.”

     “You really are a rascal, you know that?” I replied, with a tone full of nothing but pure endearment for him and his antics.

     “It doesn’t matter what recipe you use,” Kneezles continued. “It’s about tradition. It’s actually kind of neat that you don’t follow a recipe anymore. It’s like it’s our own secret family recipe.”



     “It’s our thing,” I offered.

     “It’s our thing.”

     So that, dear readers, is the truth of our secret family Yellow Negg Pancake recipe. It doesn’t matter how high you stack your pancakes, how well you sift your flour, or how exactly at room temperature you keep your ingredients. What matters is the memories you make with your Neopets each year. That you forge your own traditions together, and find your “thing”, together.

     Our thing is Yellow Negg Pancakes.

     The End.