Making hotcakes even more delicious.

Manga fans in Japan are whipping up pancakes, following an exciting revelation in the March issue of Comic Beam. This latest issue of the popular monthly manga magazine, which went on sale on 12 February, has been flying off shelves as it features a comic called “Let’s go to the family restaurant” by manga artist Wayama Yama, which continues on from Yama’s previous manga, “Let’s go to karaoke“, picking up on the story four years later.

While this new installment is enough to excite Yama fans, there’s even more to be excited about because within the story, one of the characters, Narita Kyoji, reveals a hack for making pancakes that’s got everyone talking.

▼ The hack is simple, and all it requires is pancake mix, an egg, and a McDonald’s vanilla thickshake.

Pancake afficianados will probably have a good idea of where we’re going with these ingredients, because according to Yama’s manga, baking pancakes with a vanilla McShake instead of milk makes them even more delicious.

We’re always fascinated by manga food of any description, so we immediately set out to test this claim. Opening the pancake mix, we followed all the instructions, only adding 100 millilitres (3.4 ounces) of the McShake in place of 100 millilitres of milk.

The small size McShakes in Japan contain roughly 190 millilitres of thickshake, so we ended up using just over half of the shake for the pancakes. That meant we had some left over to enjoy on the side, and after taking a sip we realised it had been a long time since we last tasted it, as it was much sweeter than we remembered.

Added sweetness is never a bad thing when it comes to our preferred pancakes, so we continued with the instructions, mixing the egg, shake and pancake mix together until it formed a silky smooth batter.

At this stage, we didn’t see any noticeable difference between this batter and a regular one made with milk, but that all changed after we baked it in our special pancake maker.

▼ Yes, our pancake maker imprints a cute cat on the surface.

The pancake was less thick than usual, which made us think it might be denser in texture. However, when we sliced into it and took a bite, we found it was beautifully fluffy. It was as if the iciness of the shake helped to reduce the formation of gluten, in the same way that adding ice to tempura batter creates a crispier result.

While it didn’t seem much sweeter than what we’re used to, the texture felt smoother than usual, and it tasted closer to the pancakes that you eat in fancy cafes, giving us a much better result than anything we’ve ever made at home.

▼ Thank you for the great hack, Narita Kyoji!

Who knew a manga could lead us to such a tasty dessert? Next time you have a craving for pancakes, you might want to give this hack a try and let us know how you like them!

Source, images: Press release
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]