I have a confession to make.
I don’t like pancakes. I really,
really want to like pancakes. It is cake
you can have for breakfast. It is
portable cake that you can cover in all sorts of other goo. How can I not like pancakes?
But the thing is that pancakes aren’t really cake. The ratios of fat to starch and dry to liquid
as well as the variance in leavening really make this an entirely different
animal. But, I order pancakes expecting
them to taste like yellow cake and they never do. I have tried all sorts of variations and
recipes, and while I have made some fairly tasty pancakes, they don’t ever
taste like what I want them to taste like…yellow cake.
My husband and I were discussing this, and he asked me the
question that has been staring me in the face all this time…Why don’t I just
make pancakes out of cake batter? He has
a point. I mean really what is the worst
that can happen. If it doesn’t work, I
can just pour the rest of the batter in a cake pan and throw it in the
oven. I would still have cake, and I may
even discover a pancake I would actually like.
I decided I would do this with a cake mix because I wasn’t
certain I wanted to invest the time it takes to make the cake batter from
scratch. As mentioned above, I am also aware
of the differences between cake and pancake batter. For one
thing, cake batter is significantly thinner than pancake batter. I really didn’t want to have cake batter
running all over my griddle and the counter and the floor, etc when I poured
into the pan.
I opted to do a little research into the differences and see
if there is a way that I could balance the batter without losing the yellow
cake essence. I started looking at
recipes in my trusted sources (Alton Brown and Joy of Cooking)*. Pancakes require a starch (all-purpose
flour or a blend of flours or what have
you), some sort of fat, some sort of liquid, a leavening agent, and a binder
(well and a flavoring agent but that really isn’t all that necessary with
pancakes). Cakes have similar
requirements. In the end though, the method
by which heat is applied to each to create the chemical reactions necessary for
either to turn out as intended is drastically different. So the ratios and types of ingredients is
going to change.
Cakes rise because of the leavener (generally some
combination of baking soda and baking powder) ; however because of the slower
cooking time, they don’t need as much as the pancakes do. This is because the other thing that makes them rise is the
steam that builds up inside the cakes. The
starch helps hold these pockets of steam until the protein in the eggs heats
and binds together forming a spongy network that holds it shape even after the
steam evaporates (I couldn’t find my chem paper for college a few years ago so I
am probably not explaining that entirely correct).
Pancakes heat much faster.
It is the reason pancakes don’t use butter. Butter is where the water to create the steam
often comes from in cake recipes. Butter
melts too fast in pancakes so you end up with fat and no water (it already
evaporated) before the pockets have formed.
Essentially it’s a great big mess, and pancakes really need to hold
their own shape while heating. The
steam thing happens differently so more chemical leavening is required to get
the necessary rise in the shorter-hotter cooking time. Many of the ingredients also need to do a
little double duty. For instance many
pancake recipes call for buttermilk as it adds fat and moisture at the same
time and also helps with the leavening process.
While I understand the process, neither my chemistry or my
algebra skills are really strong enough to determine what exactly I needed to
do to give this experiment its best possible hope for success. And, then I remembered that most ideas have
been probably already been thought by someone else before you. In the age of almost ubiquitous internet,
someone has also probably blogged about it.
And it’s true. The
sites I had read confirmed my suspicions from above and provided some handy
ratios. I wasn’t willing to invest in a
grocery store run for experimental breakfast, so I took their ratios and
combined them with what I had in my pantry to come up with the following:
1 yellow cake mix
1-1.5 cups flour
Almost 1 tsp more of baking soda, about a tablespoon of
sugar, and some extra salt (maybe a pinch or two)
2 cups vanilla almond milk
½ cup sour cream (I had some I wanted to use up)
2 eggs
A splash of vanilla
Cake mix is really clumpy and I ended up needing to use a
hand mixer to get this to break down. I
worried this would over process the batter a bit, but it needed to be
done. Sifting might be a better option.
It actually worked pretty well. I ended up with pancakes that tasted like
yellow cake.
These are a little too
sweet to really be a breakfast food but they aren’t a bad snack. It makes A LOT of batter so I ended up
pouring the rest in a bundt pan with some chocolate chips and popping it in the
oven. I am not sure that these have
converted me to a pancake eater, but I certainly had an enjoyable scientific experiment
this morning.
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