breakfast for dinner

Remember how your parents told you not to play with your food, but you kept on doing it anyway?  We love having fun with the stuff we eat, don't we?  So much that we have to be told not to do it.  Come on, admit it - even as adult, you can't resist the temptation sometimes.  ^_^

I'm not really fond of blogging about food and food places, but as this week's happy thawts are hinged on dinner, this'll sort of be about a food place.  But no, it's not quite a review.

For years now, my cousin C has been egging me on about how we should meet up outside of family gatherings.  We agreed it would be nice to go out like how we used to when we were younger, except not for teenagery stuff this time.  Anyway, we were finally able to set aside some time to do it this week.  And that's happy thawt number one:  Seeing one of my favorite cousins on a workday. It was nice getting together like that. I'd almost forgotten how fun it could be to just hang out with her.

So here's an awful phone-cam photo of us, after-work eyebags and all.
Photoshopping this would take a lot of work, so forget that.

Now here comes happy thawt number two. 

We agreed to meet in Eastwood City, since it was a midpoint of sorts after work (both for her and myself, and for the Hubby, who was joining us).  We walked around a bit and decided on a place called Slappy Cakes.

We were quite drawn to Slappy Cakes because of two things: the thought of having breakfast for dinner (i love pancakes), and the thought of having some fun with our food.  Each table had this griddle in the middle, where diners can cook pancakes just how they want them. The menu even offers several different kinds of batter, and a gamut of sweet and savory fillings and toppings.  How fun is that for a pancake-lover, right?

You can make yourself something comforting like a  a blueberry-strawberry buttermilk pancake...

Or attempt a designer banana-walnut-peanut butter-salted chocolate pancake with Nutella, or a crazy bacon and cheese and mushroom pancake with mango syrup.  Or not.  ^_^

The batter comes in these nifty squeeze bottles that minimize the mess...

... so you could also make your pancakes into any shape you want to.  Hearts or stars or letters and stuff. In fact, the  folks in the other booth were spelling words out with their batter.

As for our table, we wondered ...

So here's the Hubby on flipping duty ...

... and our mini vegan-batter pancake with banana and bacon, just about getting bubbly.  There's nothing vegan about this pancake anymore though.  We're not trying to be vegan, but we went for the vegan batter because the food server said it tasted good with bacon.  Who would've thought, right?  It was pretty tasty, actually.

It's the sort of place kids and non-boring adult pancake fans would like.  I'd probably come back, but with a couple of nephews or a nieces next time.