How to Create the Perfect Hotcake

In a small café, a crowd of rooting regulars gathered around a portly man who sat at a corner booth holding a fork in his hand that dripped with maple syrup. He felt green about the gills and wasn’t sure if he could withstand another bite of Pearls jumbo hotcakes without heaving it all over the crisp white tablecloth.
    “Come on Lloyd, you can do it,” a tall slender man in bib overalls shouted above the crowd. “It’s your last bite and then you’ll be wearing the crown.”
    Lloyd blew out a deep breath, and then slowly raised the fork toward his mouth. The crowd grew silent as they leaned in to watch the last bit of the hotcakes disappear from his plate. Lloyd swallowed hard, and then with a smile released a thunderous belch. The crowd roared with laughter and cheer.
    “He finally did it Pearl,” chuckled the old man who sat behind the counter in a rocking chair smoking a cigar.
    “Well it’s about time,” Pearl replied, as she quickly erased the first place winner from the chalkboard, and then printed in large letters Lloyd Ferguson. “I was beginning to think that no one in this town could beat that outsider.”
    Just then, a young man with scruffy dark brown hair peered out from behind the kitchen door. “What’s all the commotion about?”
    “Lloyd just beat the record,” Pearl said with a grin.
    “Oh yeah, and how many did he wolf down?”
      Pearl glanced over at her husband Fritz whose ears were absorbed in the conversation of Lloyd's triumph over the humongous hotcakes. He was laughing, so hard that the cigar he gripped between his teeth jiggled in every direction.
    Pearl shook her head, “Fritz, how many?”
    Fritz looked over at Pearl, his eyes tearing with laughter. He shifted his weight in his chair, and then glanced down at the marks on the paper. Scribbling down a number, he stuck the pencil behind his ear and answered, “forty-four.”