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Æbleskivers

While Karen was unpacking in my mom’s kitchen, she came across this pan:
Æbleskive

I had known this as my mom’s takoyaki pan, which is how my mom identified it as well. Karen, on the other hand, saw an Æbleskiver pan.

Æbleskiver ingredients Æbleskivers are essentially Danish pancake balls, and Karen was excited about trying out the pan. So on our last day in Texas, we decided to make them for the family breakfast.

They’re traditionally stuffed with apples or applesauce (or left un-stuffed) and served with powdered sugar and jam. We didn’t have any apples on hand, but we tried a variety of fillings: chocolate (for R), fresh blueberries, and lemon curd. I also brought a few jars of my homemade plum jam with us, so we could have some of that with our ball cakes.

The way they’re made is somewhat similar to the method used when making imagawayaki (hockey puck-shaped Japanese bean cakes). I remember being mesmerized by the imagawayaki maker in Little Tokyo when I was a child. I must have spent hours watching him over the years, and recall the various steps he took:

Greased the heated wells (he used a tightly rolled towel dipped in oil)
Used this ca-chunk ca-chunk device to squirt batter into half the wells
Using a long semi-cylindrical hand tool to hold the sweet beans, he used a small spatula to push a dollop of beans onto the batter.
Used the ca-chunk ca-chunk device again to squirt batter into the remaining empty wells
Once the batter started bubbling, he’d pick up bean-filled cakes and carefully place them onto the plain ones (two wells make one full cake)
Using the ice pick and a flourish of his wrist, he’d flip each cake to heat both sides evenly
Once done, he’d remove the cakes from the wells, arrange them in horizontal rows in front of the grill, then repeat from step 1.

This man, of course, was an artiste. Each movement was elegant. Precise. Each tool he used was exactly what he needed to complete the task at hand.

Karen and I, on the other hand, had never done this before and were lucky to keep the batter in the wells and prevent them from burning. We were goofy. Sloppy. (OK, when I helped it was sloppy). Cakes came out in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and colors… She tried spatulas and chopsticks (we didn’t have ice picks or skewers). She tried adding dollops of butter to the wells, then pastry brushes and melted butter. She tried solo efforts, then we tag-teamed it alternating batter - filling - batter - flipping - sugaring duties…

It was fun. And despite this being the first attempt, they were still quite delicious!

Æbleskivers