Anniversary Waffles (or not)

It was mine and Mr VST's first wedding anniversary on Sunday, I can't believe it's been a year since the happiest day of my life already! For our honeymoon we went to Iceland and were lucky enough to stay at Hotel Ranga for four nights. I love that place. It is fantastic in every way, the food there was the best I've ever had. For breakfast each morning they laid on an amazing buffet with cereal, Icelandic yoghurt, fresh pastries, bread and a wonderful selection of fruit. One of our favourite items as part of the buffet was the fresh waffles. There was a big bowl of batter next to the waffle machine and you made your own waffles. Our favourite waffle toppings were lashings of honey and nuts. To celebrate our anniversary Mr VST surprised me on Friday evening with the purchase of our very own waffle maker so that we can start our anniversary holiday with a tasty reminder of our honeymoon.

Mr VST slept in on Saturday morning, which was a blessing as I had to ice our surprise wedding/anniversary cake but not so great as we were supposed to be having pre-anniversary waffles together and as it happened we didn't have time before I went to the hairdressers. 

When I returned from the hairdressers Mr VST had set the table and surprised me with a bunch of mango calla lillies (which were the main flower in my wedding bouquet). He is such a romantic!

We set about making the batter and setting up the waffle maker. The batter recipe was one Mr VST had found on the BBC Good Food website. It was really easy to make and he fired up the waffle maker.

The instructions said that the first time you heat it up you need to grease the plates and that it would smoke. We followed the instructions but after the plastic panel smoked quite a lot and became too hot to touch I switched the machine off for fear that it would ignite. 

We checked through all the instructions again and tentatively switched the waffle maker back on, nothing happened. Nothing at all. No lights, no smoke, no heat. We had killed it. 

Waffle batter is very similar to pancake batter so I decided to make some American pancakes with the batter instead. I also thought I'd try and make 'waffles' using my crumpet rings in a pan. These took ages to cook though and weren't great. They were like a cross between a waffle, pancake and crumpet!

The pancakes themselves were good and we filled ourselves up on pancakes with bananas and maple syrup. 

The waffle reunion will have to wait I'm afraid and the waffle machine is wrapped and ready to return. 

P.S. I hadn't made waffles before and so I've been doing some research. I didn't realise that there were quite so many types of waffles!