Simple pancakes are not the only way to celebrate this time of year

With Pancake Day over and done with for another year, I’ve certainly managed more than enough of pancakes to tide me over a hypothetical Lent if fasting was a thing for me. But – excuse my unholiness – with a food column, sugar addiction, and a persistent need to check Wikipedia for the reason Pancake Day is celebrated at all, I feel like I’m committed to a sturdy diet of no-bounds sugary goodness all year round. If you’re here to figure out what is the new vogue in fasting, burn the page or block the website on your browser before temptation takes over: as with all things, lessons can be learned from Pancake Day, and I’m here to tell you how to make the next Pancake Day bigger and better.

I seem to undergo an annual déjà vu on Pancake Day, with flashbacks to swearing to do things differently the following year. Now, pancakes may well be a tradition hailing from the Middle Ages, but at every pancake party there is always the unfortunate keeper of the crêpe pan. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching the batter turn into golden brown deliciousness. But sometimes I just want to dig into a pancake when it’s still fresh from the pan, without keeping an eye on the next one for the ever-present hungry masses – after all, on a student budget, free pancakes are a time-tested hit and the cook is rarely left with a free moment.

If you’re willing to break with tradition, there are ways to make your future pancake days easier to dish up while retaining all of the original gluttony – after all, Pancake Day isn’t known globally as Mardi Gras or ‘Fat Tuesday’ for no reason.

Looking beyond pancakes, New Orleans is the definite destination, both in terms of carnival knowledge and culinary culture. Here a dictionary is a must for the uninitiated to navigate the Mardi Gras streets filled with po’boy, beignets, calas, gumbo, paczki, and jambalaya. A somewhat more pronounceable option is the king cake, a treat found across the globe in different forms and on different occasions. The most common versions are takes on either a hollow circle of sweet brioche, with a glazed top and coloured sugar to match the carnival look, or puff pastry filled with chocolate, almonds, apple, or anything else you might dream up.

A staple feature is a small toy baby hidden in the cake (although, as true believers in health and safety, some bakers now leave the baby outside the cake to avoid responsibility for choking carnival-goers), symbolising baby Jesus and allegedly bringing luck to whoever finds it first. Also a testimony to the popularity to king cake is its spread to other holidays: you can find versions tuned not only to Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and St Patrick’s Day, but also to the start of football season and the tailgate parties of Louisiana State University and New Orleans Saints.

However, if you find the New Orleans-style extravaganza a bit much, there is always the option of the more contained Nordic noir. While cinnamon buns, gravlax, and smorgasbords have made themselves known to British palates though IKEA, the rest of Nordic cuisine remains unexplored territory. It may seem a meagre start to Lent, but peasoup features on the Mardi Gras menu of the north. Traditionally – nowadays not so much – fortified with pig head and pig feet, this dish is guaranteed to provide fasters with an artery-clogging dose of animal fat. A perhaps more appealing option is semla, a sweet bun filled with lashings of whipped cream and jam or almond paste, and topped with icing sugar – mouthwateringly decadent, easy to make, messy to eat. The ultimate savior of any pancake party that still wishes to remain a pancake party without having someone man the pan the whole night comes also from the North, in the form of the oven pancake. This is essentially a thicker, more scrumptious version of its crêpe cousin, baked on an oven tray, with the added benefit that when the batter has gone into the oven, there is no need to flip or watch anything – just set a timer and wait for multiple servings of deliciousness emerge.