So, lo and behold, it’s Saturday morning. It’s the day before Mother’s Day, and we’re going to be driving most of the day tomorrow, so it seemed like the perfect time to cook something a bit special for breakfast. After thinking about it a bit, I decided that what I really wanted was German Pancakes.

That posed a bit of a problem. You see, German Pancakes want to be cooked in the oven. And we’re in the middle of remodeling.

The oven goes about where the white bucket is sitting. Until the remodel is done, we’re stuck cooking with just an induction pad and a convection microwave. There’s no way the microwave will heat up to 450°, which is what the recipe calls for. What’s a hungry programmer to do? Why, improvise, of course. There’s one more cooking appliance available, although it’s not widely used for baking pancakes:

Technically, there’s no reason you can’t bake in an outdoor gas grill, but getting the temperature control right is tricky. I let it heat up for 15 minutes, and then tweaked the settings to get it to stay around 450°. Then I put a stainless steel frying pan onto the grill (all of the cast iron is packed up for now) and let it heat up for another 10m, and checked the temperature:

Looks like it’ll hold 450° just fine. The recipe calls for 20-25m of cooking time, but that’s always seemed high to me; our old oven usually took 15-20m. After 17m I checked the pancake, and it looked perfect:

There’s nothing like grilled pancake for breakfast, now is there?