Sticky Date Pancakes with Butterscotch Sauce & Roasted Pears – fluffy, light pancakes, warmly spiced with cinnamon & nutmeg.  Jump to Recipe 

I realise this is a little late, being the day after the occasion, but yesterday was Mother’s Day here in Australia and New Zealand. Like all major holidays now, it is heavily commercially driven – shopping centres were packed with families buying flowers and treats, and baby pink Mother’s Day specials are heavily advertised- but the premise remains. Mine was in another country, but I did get a call from one of my brothers – “Claudia! What cake should I make for Mum?!”. My brothers very rarely put anything in the oven, so this is an unusual phone call. One is just starting to master chocolate self-saucing pudding, largely provoked by self-interest – now that I am no longer living at home, no one else will be making dessert! Dad even produces the occasional fruit crumble, missing the after-dinner sugar fix.

It was my mother and grandmother who started me baking. I was always interested in food, as the baby constantly grasping at whatever my parents were eating and the toddler that would climb into the cupboards of strangers in search of cookies, but they gave me the initial boost, the tools to make my own. Mum’s double chocolate muffins were a staple lunch box item – the simple mix of wet and dry, yogurt and butter with cocoa and flour, eating as many chocolate chips as possible on the way. Lemon yogurt cake was another favourite –  everything into a food processor and poured into a old dented ring tin, the fluffy, zesty batter always exploding out the top for a very rustic finished product.

With Grandma it was jam stars, a basic shortbread dough cut into squares, jam dolloped in the middle and corners folded in with sticky fingers. I ventured on from there – chocolate chip cookies after school age 8, frequent french toast breakfasts, my neiman-marcus cookies in high school (nicknamed ‘Claudia cookies’ by friends), weekend breakfasts, and onto tarts and layer cakes later. I had a little notebook of handwritten recipes in wonky 12 year old script, pages stained with various unknown foods and added to with enthusiasm. I moved onto a bigger ring binder, filled with pages of photocopied recipes from cookbooks I loaned from the local library – soon the binder began exploding with the sheer thickness of paper, and there was no way I could ever try them all. The current version had to be carefully pared back and refined – I did not need 15 different versions of brownie, as good as they all looked. Old baking tins of my Dad’s mother are still used often – I sometimes wonder what she used them for, what her favourites were.

Mum isn’t a huge breakfast-in-bed person, preferring to get up and exercise before her daily fruit and muesli, so when I made these a few weeks ago on holiday it was a decadent lunch time treat. She was an outstanding hand model for these shots though! And to mum, when you read this – honestly, you couldn’t be more supportive, generous, and generally amazing, and as I get older, my appreciation for how much you do for us four only grows.

As I type this, it is bucketing down with rain on the thin roof, the windows are just beginning to fog, and although it is midday, the grey dreary skies necessitate lights inside. Ideal weather for these sticky date pancakes with butterscotch sauce & roasted pears. Light and fluffy thanks to beaten egg white, and warmly spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, the pancakes are enriched with a sticky date paste to make a brunch version of the classic pudding. Roasted pears are tender and just caramelised, but if berries are in season try them for a fresh, cool contrast. Warm butterscotch sauce is poured over the top, dripping over the edges and encircling the pancakes in a sweet toffee caramel pool.

The pancake recipe is adapted from Ottolenghi’s Sweet Potato Pancakes, substituting a homemade date paste and adjusting quantities for a flippable pancake batter. That brief inspiration turned out better than expected – a thick, pillowy pancake studded with date chunks that really isn’t too difficult or time-consuming to make. No one in my family could turn them down!

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