Carrot Cake Pancakes

This is an easy recipe to jazz up your breakfast pancakes. I enjoy making pancakes for my family almost every weekend. To keep things interesting, I like to incorporate season ingredients or make seasonally themed pancakes. We’ve had everything from banana chocolate chips to berries to pumpkin to orange zest with craisins. This one is one of my favorites because it’s a twist on one of my favorite cakes.

I made these for Easter Sunday breakfast. It’s like a treat for me and satisfies everything I crave about carrot cake without all that sugar and I don’t feel guilty about having it for breakfast (or dinner). My typical pancake recipe is easy. I don’t like to overthink things on weekends. Just throw some ingredients together. I like that one to one to one ratio to one. One cup flour, one cup milk, one tablespoon baking powder to one egg. Everything else is on the fly and adjustable to my mood at the time.

Here are a few other notes:

• Baking powder – as mentioned, I like that 1:1 ratio, but you really don’t need as much baking powder. You can reduce this down to 2 teaspoons without much impact to the recipe.
• Milk – zero % fat, low fat, whole milk, buttermilk – anything goes. I prefer the whole milk for this recipe, but I usually use whatever is available in the fridge.
• Spices – you can add whatever spices you typically add carrot cake, but it really doesn’t need much more than cinnamon.
• Oil – instead of the oil you can use melted butter. Sometimes I will melt the butter in the pan that I will fry the pancakes in to do double duty and grease the pan as well.
• Cream cheese glaze – that cream cheese glaze is great for cinnamon rolls and if you want cinnamon rolls like that popular chain, this is the way to go. If you cream cheese has not been sitting at room temperature long enough, you may experience some clumping. If you do, just microwave the glaze on high at 5 second intervals, stirring vigorously in between until you get a smooth glaze. Alternatively, you can microwave the block of cream cheese for 5 or 10 seconds before adding the powdered sugar and milk. Careful if you do this as it may pop and make a mess in your microwave.