Heavenly Hots

Author Notes

Sometimes the name of a dish is irresistible: Ratatouille. Financiers. Mooncakes. Oysters Rockefeller. Fallen soufflé. Anything confited. And my recent favorite, pudding chômeur (biscuit dough baked in maple syrup and cream—a delight that Canadians have been keeping to themselves), which translates to "unemployed-person pudding." When I began work on this book and several readers wrote in about heavenly hots, there was no question—I had to try a recipe with that name.

Although heavenly hots sound like a late-night cable offering, they're nothing more salacious than pancakes. Once you make them, you'll understand the name: they are so feathery, creamy, and tangy—so heavenly that you find yourself unable to let them cool at all before devouring them.

Heavenly hots clarify what's wrong with other pancakes-namely, that most of them are god-awful: doughy, heavy thuds in our bellies. You always think they're a great idea until about ten minutes after you've eaten them.

What makes the hots so heavenly is that they ignore all the classic ratios of flour to sugar to eggs (sorry, Michael Ruhlman!). They're made with low-gluten cake flour and just enough of it to lash the batter of sour cream, sugar, and salt into fragile cakes.

The only problem with heavenly hots is that your first batch is likely to be a wash. The batter is very loose and it produces pancakes-some might call them blini-that are about as sturdy as wet tissue paper. You need to take deep breaths when it's time for flipping, and you need to let the hots know you're the boss. Timid jabs with a spatula will not end well.

Heavenly hots were popularized at the Bridge Creek Restaurant in Berkeley, but the original recipe came from Bob Burnham, a chef who once worked for John Hudspeth, later the owner of Bridge Creek. Burnham served a sugarless version like blini, with caviar. At Bridge Creek, they were breakfast, served in stacks and doused with maple syrup—"real maple syrup," Hudspeth said, "which was unusual in Berkeley at the time." They're the kind of recipe that makes an impression. Hudspeth named his company Heavenly Hots, Inc., and Marion Cunningham, the author of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and a friend of Hudspeth, included the hots in The Breakfast Book.

—Recipe adapted from Marion Cunningham and The Bridge Creek Restaurant in Berkeley, California. Excerpted from "The Essential New York Times Cookbook." —Amanda Hesser

Test Kitchen Notes

You can substitute light brown sugar for the sugar and full-fat Greek yogurt for the sour cream.

Don't cook the pancakes all the way through. You want the center to be a pocket of cream.

The pancakes are so fragile that it may take a few tries to flip them. I used the thinnest, most flexible spatula I own, wedged it halfway under each pancake, letting the other half hang, then turned my wrist and gently laid the cake down on its other side. I recommend this over more aggressive flipping, which will tear the pancakes. —Amanda Hesser