Christmas Pancake Breakfast...sort-of

Christmas Baking! It brings back such great memories of my childhood! I try to keep up the traditions my family, and my husband's family so that our kids will have the same sweet memories.So, like many of you, I have been living in the kitchen cooking up a storm! Sugar cookies, candy, etc...I do feel a bit like the red hen though...everyone wants to taste the dough, or the frosting, or some chocolate left on the spoon, but then they all disappear until it's all finished, then they come out of the woodwork ready to chow down on the goods!

This being the weekend before Christmas, and a Saturday morning, I thought I'd make a fun Christmas Breakfast using the darling Christmas Pancake Molds that my friend Valory gave me...
Cute right? I also picked up some chocolate, mint pancake mix the other day, so my plan was set. I will make these amazingly cute and festive pancakes and it will be the start of my children's most treasured Christmas memory yet! So,I get out my mixing bowl,mix up the yummy smelling pancake batter, read the instructions for their use (of course!) And I begin. The instructions are simple:1)Put pancake mold on pre-heated griddle. Check. 2)Pour a 1/2 cup of batter into mold. Check.
3)when top of pancake is bubbly, simply remove non-stick, easy clean mold from pancake and lightly flip over with a spatula. Right. FIRST of all, the "non-stick" molds aren't that non-sticky...I could NOT get the suckers to release!! Finally, after some very violent shaking, the thing plops in a gooey, spreading mess that resembles a melted snowman rather than a snowflake, gingerbread man or reindeer.Hmmm. OK, maybe it was just a fluke...I try again...same dang result...one more time, I think I might be getting the hang of it kind-of...Nope.

By now, I'm extremely miffed and cursing Williams-Sonoma, Martha Stewart, Norman Rockwell, and Betty Crocker...these people are MASTERS of trick photography. Lance stops by to see how it's going, since he can hear my cursings at the blasted things from across the house. He takes one look at my creations, and then at the picture of what they're SUPPOSED to look like, and says," You should make them look like the picture" I give him the stink eye -which he is very familiar with, then he says," But it's OK if you make the Picasso kind..."However, still determined to provide my children with a magical Christmas holiday breakfast, I bail on this project, make regular shaped pancakes, and copying an idea from Conor's class holiday party, make Rudolph pancakes.
Feeling quite proud of myself for single-handedly saving my children's Christmas memories, I excitedly called them down for breakfast.As they filed into the kitchen ,I hear things like,"I already ate some cereal", and "Oh, do we HAVE to have pancakes?", and my personal favorite, when Wyatt walked in, he burst into tears and cried," I SAID I wanted a Gingerbread man!" I roll my eyes and start mumbling under my breath about how un-grateful my kids are and that children in Africa would LOVE Rudolph pancakes...Lance, the sweet man that he is, has everyone sit down and gives a nice little speech/pep-talk about how nice mom is to make the holidays so much fun, and thank you for the work, and everyone better take a bite...thanks sweetie! :)
Wyatt bit the head off of the maimed form of a gingerbread man pancake that I gave him, and Conor re-arranged his to look like a Santa and ate off his eyes and nose and they both left the table claiming they were "full".



Whatever.