Rise and shine,  flapjack freaks.

You have a narrow, three-hour window in which to score some free pancakes, and the clock starts ticking at 6 this morning. So get those shoes on now and head to the new IHOP in Columbia Heights.

To celebrate the opening of its 1,500th restaurant, IHOP is giving the first 1,500 people at the Columbia Heights eatery a free short stack of buttermilk pancakes (or a certificate for them). And if free flapjacks aren't enough to stir you out of bed this morning, how about this: Some pastry chefs plan to build one of Washington’s most famous monuments out of pancakes, with an assist from students enrolled in the culinary program at Bell Multicultural High School.

Here's the rest of the day's schedule:

6-9 a.m.: Get your free flapjack certificates

6 a.m.-3 p.m.: Pancake monument under construction

9 a.m.: Ribbon cutting with dignitaries, including Councilmember Jim Graham, Council Chairman-elect Kwame Brown, IHOP President Jean Birch, and the owners of the local franchise group.

6:30-10:30 a.m.: Live entertainment

The IHOP is located at DC USA, 3100 14^th St. NW

Photo by juliejigsaw via Flickr Creative Commons, Attribution License

And he samples the chain's version of the KFC Double Down: a stack of cheesecake filled pancakes. Norton's take is delightfully dry and droll, particularly this observation about the pancakes covered in "apples":

"That can only loosely be described as an apple. That's corn syrup on something gelatinous."

Video courtesy of Chow.com

While grabbing lunch this weekend in the Palisades, the wife and I stopped by the neighborhood Safeway for a few dinner ingredients. As I got out of the car, I noticed this huge poster on the side of Safeway, advertising a monstrosity called Batter Blaster. They're pancakes in a can.

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I had to try it. I'm a sucker for American food-science ingenuity, no matter how stupid it is. I still remember how cool it was when someone invented stackable potato chips. Batter Blaster may remind you of Kraft's Easy Cheese, but its maker is aiming higher than that much-maligned product. The wheat flour, cane sugar, egg solids, and soybean powder are all organic.

BB squirts its raw batter like whipped cream from a Co2 canister. The pancakes, however, contain more air than bubble wrap. You can see the little air pockets everywhere as the batter starts to brown in your skillet. It makes for a very airy pancake, which is not the same as light and fluffy, believe me. This thing had all the heft of a rice cake.

I could have lived with the hot-air issue, I guess, but I couldn't swallow the hotcake's flavor. They were sweet, probably from the cane sugar, but they were so sweet I ate them without a drop of syrup. And what's a pancake without syrup?

In our house, it was dog food. Coltrane the beagle, by the way, loved them.