We love gingerbread - the yummy mix of ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg - and don’t want to think of the December holiday season as the only time to eat it. Any morning that you have a little extra time is a yummy morning for gingerbread pancakes!
Ingredients
· 1 cup skim milk mixed with 1 TB lemon juice (or 1 c buttermilk)
· 1 1/3 cups whole-wheat flour
· 1½ teaspoons ground ginger
· 1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
· 3 shakes of nutmeg
· 1 teaspoon baking powder
· ½ teaspoon baking soda
· 1 large egg
· ¼ c raw turbinado sugar
· 1 tsp vanilla
· 1 ½ tsp unsweetened applesauce
Instructions
1. Mix milk and lemon juice and set aside to sit (to create a buttermilk of sorts)
2. In a large bowl, mix flour, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder, baking soda.
3. Whisk remaining ingredients in a smaller bowl.
4. Grease and heat skillet to medium heat. (We add a pat of unsalted butter here.) My great-grandma always says that of the most important parts of making pancakes, blintzes or crepes is having a very HOT griddle or pan. Start heating it now so it is hot by the time you pour your batter on it.
5. Make a well in the dry ingredients; add wet ingredients and mix together until just combined. (Don’t forget your buttermilk…)
6. Spoon about ¼ cup batter for each pancake onto the prepared pan and cook until bottoms are golden and small bubbles start to form on top, 3 to 4 minutes.
7. Flip and cook until the other side is browned, 1 to 2 minutes. Lightly oil/butter pan between batches if needed. Adjust heat as necessary for even browning – we had to turn the heat down after the first 2 rounds of pancakes were made. Serve hot.
8. MessyChef tops these with pure maple syrup. MessyBaker and MessyMom like them plain.
NOTE: Once, they looked runny so I left out the applesauce, and then they were stretchy and shiny instead of fluffy. So even though you might want to play around with no baking powder, no baking soda or no maple syrup - don’t leave out the applesauce!
Banana alternative: Once I split the batter and made half with the spices and ½ the amount of applesauce - and the other half of the batter with no spices, no applesauce - but one mashed overripe banana. That was yummy!
And one time, we used canned pumpkin instead of applesauce, but the batter was too thick, so we thinned it out with a TB veg oil and an extra TB milk.
