Pancake Tuesday

To kick off March, we celebrated Pancake Tuesday with the Pancake Challenge!

We started off with our usual opening ceremony, then the Pathfinders and 3rd Year Guides headed into the kitchen to make pancakes and hot chocolate for everyone to enjoy!. 

While waiting, the 1st and 2nd Year Guides set up the tables and chairs and played a game of Pancake Tag made up by one of the Guides. 

After eating and cleaning up, we found a bit about the History of Pancake Tuesday:. In the Christian tradition, the 41st day before Easter is known as Shrove Tuesday and is a day when people went to church to confess their sins and prepare themselves for the fasting of Lent, the 40 day period before Easter. Shrove comes from the word 'shrive', which means to give absolution after hearing confession. The practice of Pancake Tuesday came about as this day was also the last chance to use up food that couldn't be eaten during the 40 days of Lent, including eggs, fat and milk. The earliest known English recipe for pancakes dates from the 15th century, although pancakes had been eaten in other countries for centuries before that. 

We also discovered some interesting Pancake Records:

• The largest pancake was made in Rochdale, Manchester, UK in 1994, measuring 15.01 metres in diameter, 2.5 cm thick, and weighing 3 tonnes.
• Australian celebrity chef Brad Jolly holds the record for most pancake tosses in 1 minute - he flipped a pancake 140 times in one minute at an event in Sydney in 2012.
• The record for highest pancake flip belongs to Dominic Cuzzacrea, who flipped a pancake 9.47 meters in New York in 2010.
• Ross McCurdy from Kingston, Washington made 1,092 pancakes in one hour in 2013 - the record for pancakes made by a single person in an hour.
• An event held at the University of Sheffield, UK in 2012 had 890 people tossing pancakes at the same time.
• A team of 175 volunteers using 37 griddles made 76,392 pancakes in 8 hours in Atlanta, Georgia in 2009 - the pancakes were served to about 20,000 people.

To use up some energy, we then played Flap the Pancake, a relay game, where each Patrol has a paper pancake that has to be flipped to the opposite end of the playing area and back using another sheet of paper. The first Patrol to finish wins!

Our final activity was to Design the Ultimate Pancake. There were some really unique ideas for pancakes, including the Riverdale Pancake, which had ice cream, whipped cream, sprinkles, chocolate sauce, bananas, strawberry sauce, gingerbread, and lots of fruit (fortunately we were designing on paper!). 
We ended with reminders for next week (no meeting - it's March Break!) and closed with Taps.