So this weekend I got to go back to Brisbane for a long weekend to pack up my things. It worked out well because it coincided with a public holiday, which meant that I was able to do 5 days back home. After the week I had last week, it was so nice to go back. Seeing my family, friends and my partner really made me start feeling like myself again and was just what I needed to tackle my house hunting! Plus everyone endeavored to feed me up with delicious food, which is always going to put a smile on my face! After a few weeks of eating mainly vegetarian, I have to say it was nice to eat some meat. Guess I’m not cut out for a life of no prosciutto (and other meats I guess).
I was so happy to spend a solid amount of time with my partner. Without sounding too soppy, I’ve really missed him and it was so good to see him again, even though it’s only been two weeks! God, I have a feeling I’m going to be missing him a lot, but hopefully it will get easier with time!
With all the time spent packing and with my partner and family, I almost didn’t have enough time to get into the kitchen! If you read my post last week, I’ve really been craving some kitchen time, as right now I don’t really have the ingredients or ability to just whip something up when I feel like it. I would literally need to buy everything from the supermarket ingredient by ingredient, and if I did that I wouldn’t really have anywhere to put it, as I don’t have a solid place to live yet. Right now I’m just trying to keep my kitchen supplies as small as possible, which does mean that as a result my time in the kitchen is basically 90% salads, 5% eggs and 5% fun stuff, if I happen to have the ingredients! I’m surprised by how frugally I can actually live when I need to, although I am sad that it means I’m not pursuing my love of cooking and baking as much. There are only so many posts one can do about salad and eggs, and I’m pretty sure even a blog on that would be one too many!
So on Australia Day, I decided that I would cook some breakfast for my boyfriend. He needed a little more of a sleep in, and because I’m still on daylight savings time, I was wide awake. So I borrowed his pantry and was able to basically cook whatever I felt like: absolute heaven! I hadn’t had pancakes for ages, and so I decided that this could be a good thing to make. In hindsight it probably wasn’t the best thing to cook for my partner who is trying to eat healthy at the moment, but I feel like sometimes you just have to treat yourself, especially when someone else is making it for you!
I cannot believe how many different ways you can make pancakes. I am mostly a classic pancake girl myself, but I’m always making them and I never really mix it up. My boyfriend loves to experiment with crazy ingredients and combinations, and so I thought it would be worth taking a page out of his book and trying something new! So when I found a recipe for double chocolate pancakes, I was absolutely sold! I mean, you all know how much I love chocolate. I then realized half way in to cooking the pancakes that we didn’t have any maple syrup, which is kind of a serious problem. I mean pancakes without maple syrup? Nobody wants that! So I had to come up with something to pimp my pancakes, and I found it in peanut butter. I haven’t come across a flavour combination I enjoy more when it comes to sweets than peanut butter and chocolate, I mean it is a match made in heaven!
The mix of the chocolate pancakes with a gooey peanut butter caramel sauce was just pure perfection. I only wish I could have fit more pancakes in, but they were quite filling, particularly with the delicious sauce! Normally pancakes don’t tend to fill me up, but these for some reason had a little more substance than pancakes I’ve made before. They were super chocolatey and full of flavour, but I think the peanut butter caramel sauce was what brought them to the next level!
Ingredients
- 1 and 1/3 cup of Plain Flour
- 3 tablespoons of unsweetened Cocoa Powder
- 2 teaspoons of Baking Powder
- ¼ cup of Caster Sugar
- ¼ teaspoon of Salt
- 3 tablespoons of Unsalted Butter, melted
- 1 teaspoon of Vanilla Extract
- 1 and ¼ cup of Milk
- 1 Egg
- ½ packet of your favourite chocolate, roughly chopped
- 2 tablespoons of Peanut Butter (I used crunchy to give the sauce some texture)
- ½ cup of Golden Syrup
Instructions
- In a large bowl, combine the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, caster sugar and salt with a whisk.
- Add the butter, vanilla extract, milk and egg to the dry mix, and whisk until completely combined and smooth. Stir in your chopped chocolate of choice.
- Heat a frypan over a medium heat and grease the surface with some butter.
- Using a ladle, or another large spoon, scoop batter into the frypan. I made my pancakes about 10cm across, but it’s completely up to you how big you want them!
- Cook until the pancakes have bubbles on the top, and once these bubbles start popping, flip over. Cook for another minute and remove from pan. Repeat until you have no more batter, transferring to a plate in the microwave to keep the pancakes warm.
- Heat a small saucepan over a medium heat. Add the peanut butter and golden syrup to the pan.
- Stir constantly until the peanut butter has melted completely. Allow the mixture to come to a boil before removing from heat. The longer you leave it on the heat, the darker the caramel.
- Allow to sit for about 5 minutes before serving, stirring occasionally. The mixture will firm up as it cools and come together. Transfer to a bowl for serving
- Serve the pancakes with the peanut butter sauce drizzled over the top. Chocolate shavings, fruit and ice cream are optional toppings if you really want to go to the next level of breakfast.
Although these pancakes have a few more ingredients in them than what I would normally make, it was well worth the extra effort. Pancakes were one of the first things I ever learnt to cook, and so cooking them is very dear to my heart. Normally I wouldn’t worry about going to fancy with them, as my mum’s recipe always works so well! However, I’m so glad that this time I stepped out of my comfort zone and tried something new! I always look at crazy recipes for pancakes and never try them, so it was nice to finally give something different a go!
These pancakes were absolutely delicious, and I think the peanut butter sauce made them that much better. It was so thick from the peanut butter, and I think using golden syrup made it taste even better! The pancakes themselves were really light and fluffy, which was surprising because normally you need buttermilk to get that sort of texture. I think next time though I might halve the recipe when I’m making it for two, because we had so many pancakes left over, they were that filling!
My boyfriend was really happy to wake up to this dish, and his only issue was that they filled him up so much that he couldn’t keep eating! In my books that seems like a winning breakfast, so I’m glad I decided to try something different! I can’t wait to be all established in Melbourne and be able to cook up these sorts of things whenever I feel like it. This might be an issue though, because now I know how easy it is to make delicious peanut butter sauce to go on pancakes, and I might just be eating them a little too much!
Until next time, happy eating!
Ella xx
