Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Birthday Pancakes (Made with Cake Mix!)

Birthday pancakes made with cake mix! Yes, you read that correctly.

This past Sunday, May 6th, was my wonderful sister's birthday, and she happened to spend it in Boston with me. Yay! We had a super fun weekend that concluded with a Sunday brunch of birthday pancakes. Melissa has always had a sweet tooth, so when I recently came across these cake batter pancakes from How Sweet It Is on good ol' Pinterest, I right away planned on making them for Melissa.



The recipe, as I made it, is below. Definitely check out the original recipe from How Sweet It Is though. Her pictures are beautiful!

I also made half of this batch into plain pancakes and half into banana pancakes. Who doesn't love banana pancakes?!

Ingredients:

-3/4 cup yellow cake mix (any brand; I happened to use Pillsbury)
-1 and 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
-1 Tbsp. sugar
-3/4 tsp. baking powder
-pinch of salt
-2 eggs
-1 tsp. vanilla extract
-1 to 2 cups milk (I used 1%)
-assorted sprinkles
-1 banana, thinly sliced into "coins" that are halved
-fruit, maple syrup, etc. (i.e., pancake toppings of your choice!)

Instructions:

Combine cake mix, flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Add one cup of the milk, eggs, and vanilla extract. Stir until smooth. The batter should look like "traditional" pancake batter - so not too thin but not too thick. If needed, add more milk (up to 2 cups; I ended up adding about 1 and 1/4 cups of milk in total to the batter). Fold in desired amount of sprinkles. If making banana pancakes, mix in the banana slices into half the batter. If you want the whole batch to be banana pancakes, slice two whole bananas instead of just one.

In a preheated skillet or frying pan over medium heat, drop batter by the 1/4 cup full. Let cook until bubbles form on top, about 2 to 3 minutes. Flip and cook for about one minute more, or until pancakes are just slightly browned. If desired, keep cooked pancakes warm in oven (at about 200 degrees or so) until all pancakes are cooked.

Serve with fresh fruit, butter, maple syrup, or whatever your favorite pancake toppings are! Heck, you can even add more sprinkles if you'd like. The original recipe actually includes a powdered sugar glaze, so you could make that too if you wanted. I chose to just have the more traditional pancake toppings to serve with these though.


So pretty!


Although the batter looks very pretty with its colored swirls here, most of the color actually disappeared as the batter sat longer in the bowl. :( So, to make sure the sprinkles were noticeable, I ended up sprinkling some on the uncooked side of the pancakes as the first side was cooking, as you can see here.




Just love the little festive specks of color in these!



Mmmmm, fresh strawberries and Grade A maple syrup from upstate NY. You cannot go wrong with that!!


If it had been just my sister and me eating this breakfast, I am sure we would have been totally satisfied with just the pancakes. However, because our brother, Patrick, and my fiance, Mike, were eating with us, we incorporated some meat into the meal. :) Local bacon and local maple sausage! Both were seriously delicious.


I would absolutely make these pancakes again! Birthday or not, I'd make them. They were only a little bit sweeter than normal pancakes. You could tell something else was going on in there (ya know, cake mix!), but they were definitely not overly sweet at all. They were a big success among all of our taste buds, especially the birthday girl's!

Happy birthday again, sista!! :)

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