Pumpkin chocolate chip pancakes – Breakfast at Clique-any’s

It’s no secret that we love pancakes in our house (chocolate chip banana pancakes, buttermilk pancakes, all good things about pancakes….), especially for a weekend breakfast. It’s pretty much a tradition that every Saturday morning, Keith whips up a batch of the-flavor-of-the-week pancakes, often involving chocolate chips. We can’t change who we are, even at breakfast time.

In fact, we’re so set in our ways, you could probably walk into our house on any given Saturday morning and find the following things going on: Keith slaving away over a hot griddle, carefully tending to the pancake-of-the-week; Owen, with a giant grilling spatula, safely helping Keith flip the pancakes from a distance; Debbie cleaning up around and in-between Keith and Owen, determined not to spend the rest of Saturday in the kitchen. You might also hear Owen grumbling at his well-meaning mother for cleaning the batter bowl before he finished licking it….

We’ve been in a pumpkin groove lately, what with the pumpkin cornbread, the pumpkin carrot muffins and the pumpkin coconut ice cream. It only stands to reason that we’d pull our trusty ol’ pumpkin pancake recipe out of the files (read: Keith’s brain) for the season.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Pancakes

Ingredients:

• 2 cups sprouted spelt flour (or flour of your choice)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon allspice or nutmeg, or a combination
• 1/2 teaspoon ginger
• 1 cup pumpkin puree
• 2 cups milk (we use unsweetened vanilla almond milk)
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon melted butter
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup
• chocolate chips

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl, whisk wet ingredients together in another. Add wet to dry and carefully mix until just moistened. Do not overmix. Cook the way you like — griddle, pan, oven — and enjoy. We plunk the chocolate chips in as the first side of the pancake is cooking, so they’re in place when we flip. I always sprinkle ground flax seeds on mine, but you can serve yours with just butter and syrup if you like.

I just wanted to point out that even though these are fairly dense pancakes, with the pumpkin puree and the whole-grain flour, they are fluffy at heart. Look at the picture to see how they puff up while cooking; they are a wonder to behold, and nothing less. And our kid is eating squash, but please don’t tell him that pumpkin is a squash.

Clacked by Debbie McDuffee
on Nov 08, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT