Chocolate Pancakes

During the week we’re the quick breakfast kind of family. Usually eggs or oatmeal and toast. Smudge always has toast because she’s a dunker. I don’t get it, the girl dunks her toast in everything from cereal to orange juice. Ew.

But when we have time, mostly on the weekends, I like to cook something tasty, and a little more sweet for my little lover girl. And when chocolate is involved, pony up and order seconds.

The killer part of this recipe is making the master recipe of dry ingredients, doubling it, then storing the rest away for a later breakfast, or two. The result is a pancake breakfast I can whip up even on the weekdays.

You’ll find the master recipe for my Chocolate Pancakes here.  To make it up on an individual basis I’ll mix about a cup of dry pancake mix with ⅓ cup or so of milk. Then I’ll whisk the egg white of one egg, so it’s pretty fluffy, and add it to the mix. Boom! Weekend breakfast for a regular old school day. I feel like adding the chocolate is okay since  there’s a hit of chocolate in store.

I made these for Smudge’s Valentine breakfast, after I “failed” my Valentine’s Day post. A post that my husband ironically commented about.

Now my husband, or as I lovingly refer to him as G, reads every post I write. But he rarely talks about them. Probably because he is far too smart to offer an opinion to someone as bull-headed as myself. So when he does say something, it means a lot, and what he told me on Valentine’s night at the restaurant where we first met ‘lo those many years ago, sitting at the bar at 10 p.m. after dropping our daughter off for a weekend with her cousins at Grammy’s house, starving and tired and just needing to do something different. Or the same. It made me remember why I do what I do.

As we were chowing on chowder and salad, a glass of wine for me, a craft beer for him, he told me he really liked my “failed” post. What? Why would he like to see me admit that I failed?

“Because,” he said, “It was so…you. The real you.”

And that, I was reminded again, is what creativity is all about. Being yourself. Talking about the beauty—and the beast. Both of which come from within and both of which have a time and a place to remind us all that behind the smoke and mirrors, we’re all human, we all have something to share in addition to shiny rainbows and bouncy unicorns.

4.31 from 13 votes

Chocolate Pancakes

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Ingredients 

½x1x2x3x

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• ¼ cup whole wheat flour
• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• ⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• 1 1 /4 cups milk
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Instructions

• Whisk dry ingredients together in a medium bowl. In a small bowl, mix wet ingredients together until combined. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Set mix aside to rest for 10 minutes.
• Preheat a non-stick griddle to 325°F and cook pancakes in batches. Keep warm on a cookie sheet lined with a cooling rack in a 250°F oven until ready to serve.

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