To Bake Pancakes for the Crowd, Bake Them on a Baking Sheet
I love pancakes, but I don’t like making pancakes. Even in the best of circumstances, I tend to either overcook or undercooke them, resulting in a lot of waste, a lot of frustration and a lot of curse, which is not ideal when you have impressionable young children around you. Add to that trying to make them for the crowd, and it’s a recipe for disaster that I usually avoid at all costs.
However, I recently discovered a solution for making pancakes for a large company, namely baking pancakes on a baking sheet . It’s a simple, idiot-proof process – a process that takes just a few minutes to get ready, which turned out to be the only recipe that worked for me and which results in superbly consistent, evenly baked pancakes.
To make pancakes on a baking sheet, simply prepare the pancake dough as usual (either from the box mix or from scratch, whichever works for you), and then cook it on the baking sheet instead of in the skillet.
For a standard 18 “by 13” skillet, you need to make six to seven cups of pancake batter. For a standard pancake mix, that’s usually about four cups of the mix plus the liquid ingredients. (For your standard pancake dough made from scratch, such as this proven recipe from AllRecipes , this would be a double batch. After all, you’re cooking for the crowd.)
Next, you pour the dough into a well-oiled baking sheet, add whatever you want, be it blueberries, strawberries, chocolate chips, crushed bacon, or anything else you can think of, and then insert it into the oven preheated to 425 ° F. It will be ready in about 15 minutes, when the top of the pancake is light golden and the edges are golden brown. (If you want the tops of the pancakes to be a little more brown , you can top with a little melted butter, then stick it under the broiler for a minute or two.)
You are now ready to slice the giant pancake into individual pieces and sprinkle it with your usual toppings, be it syrup, butter, fruit, jam, chopped nuts, whipped cream, or all of the above.
If the baking sheet is too large for you, you can also try baking it in muffin tins for smaller pancakes.