How do you make half as many pancakes?

Picture a warm kitchen on a slow morning, with butter sizzling softly in a pan. Your favourite pancake recipe makes eight pancakes. But today only you and one grown-up are hungry, and four pancakes would be perfect.

Eight is too many, and four is exactly half of eight. So how do you make half as many pancakes? Let's open the recipe together and find out.

A recipe begins with a list of ingredients, which means all the foods you mix into the batter. Next to each one, the recipe gives an amount. Those amounts are right for eight pancakes.

To make four pancakes, you halve every amount, which means splitting it into two equal parts. Half of each amount gives you half as much batter. Because every food shrinks by the same half, the smaller batter tastes just the same.

You start with the flour. The recipe asks for two cups, so you halve it and scoop one cup into the bowl. One cup is one of the two equal parts of two cups.

The milk is trickier, because the recipe asks for only one cup. Half of one cup is less than a whole cup, so you pour the milk only up to the half cup line on the measuring cup. Now the milk is halved too.

Next comes the sugar, and two spoonfuls become one spoonful. Now look at the eggs. The recipe wants two eggs for eight pancakes. How many eggs do you think go into your smaller batter?

One egg! Half of two eggs is one egg, so you crack one egg into the bowl. Now you have halved all the ingredients.

You stir everything into a smooth batter. Then you scoop the same big spoonful for each pancake that you always use. Each pancake stays the same size, so half the batter fills half as many pancakes.

Your grown-up cooks the pancakes in the hot pan and flips them with a spatula. One, two, three, four golden pancakes land on the plate. That is half of eight, the very number you wanted.

Ingredients, halve. You make half as many pancakes when you halve every one of the ingredients and keep each pancake the same size, so half the batter fills half as many.

Enjoy every warm, fluffy bite of your four pancakes, little cook.