Recipe: Yummy Gluten-Free Gingerbread Pancakes

Nothing feels like Christmas more than delicious tasting gingerbread treats. Now add pancakes to the mix, and you got yourself the best type of festive morning you can have – Gingerbread Pancakes.

Every year, I follow the same playbook of Christmas recipes to ring in the most wonderful time of the year. Gingerbread men, chocolate truffles, some sort of festive cupcake recipe and pumpkin pie. This year, I decided to step outside of my comfort zone and make new recipes I have always wanted to dabble with. Like Gingerbread pancakes.

A lot of gluten-free recipes can be a little complex to make, but I think I have mastered the art of using non gluten-free recipes and converting them to something a little less complicated.

In all honestly though, these recipes use a very main stream refined flour which some may consider to be still as bad for you as normal flour with gluten. However, I don’t bake that often. No really, I don’t. In-fact, I haven’t had pancakes in months. And the last cake I baked was around 4 weeks ago now. So, the refined gluten-free flour I think is okay to use from time to time.

If I was baking a lot, which I was last year. then I often use almond meal for more dense cakes, buckwheat for recipes which needs a bit more fluff, and sometimes a combination of a variety of other types of more natural gluten-free flours. And a lot of baking soda to help it rise.

For these pancakes, less is more. And I like to whip things up fairly quick in the kitchen.

So, for all intensive purposes, feel free to adjust this recipe if any type of refined flour (whether that be gluten-free or not) is just not your thing.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 2 cups self-raising gluten-free flour
• 2 tablespoons whole earth brown sugar (which is a substitute for cane-based brown sugar)
• 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon ground allspice
• 1 ¼ cups almond milk
• ⅓ cup agave or rice syrup
• 2 eggs (can be replaced with bananas for a vegan version)
• 3 tablespoons unsalted olive butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger
• ½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest

Now, as I mentioned there are a few replacement items I use to reduce the sugar content of the mixture, and you can also use some worthy replacements for egg, milk and butter to make them vegan as well. I cook with a vegan olive butter made by Nuttelex, which uses only organic and natural ingredients to make the butter. No preservatives either. And no artificial colouring.

Now, this was the first time making this recipe, so I did use eggs. However, I made a gingerbread cake a while back, where I replaced the egg with banana and it worked out pretty good. For the pancakes through, I wanted to make sure they would be fluffy, so I just stuck with egg this time around.

If you do decide to switch the four for something else like buckwheat flour, just be sure to add a little extra baking soda to help keep the pancakes more on the fluffy side than the dense side – if that makes sense.

Now the fun part making the pancakes.

Here’s how to do that:

1. In a large bowl, whisk the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and spices together.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk milk, molasses, eggs, melted butter, fresh ginger and lemon zest until well combined.
3. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and gently stir until combined.
4. It’s okay if there are a few small lumps in the mixture. It’s common with pancake mixture.
5. Heat a lightly greased pan. You can grease with butter if you like, but I prefer to use a little grape seed oil.
6. Use a spoon (whatever size suits the type of pancakes you are making) and scoop up some batter and pop into the pan. I use a large silver one, but you can use a smaller one if you want smaller pancakes.
7. Cook until the batter bubbles on the surface and browns on the bottom, a minute or two, then carefully flip.
8. Cook until the batter is completely cooked through and the pancakes are slightly dark brown. Repeat until all the batter is used.
9. Serve pancakes as you make them or keep them warm as you cook them by setting them on a baking sheet in a 250-degree oven.

These were a real hit and didn’t last long, they were literally eaten as they were made LOL.

I served them with a little maple syrup and some extra cinnamon sprinkled onto. But you could also serve with a little cream or yoghurt too. Actually yoghurt doesn’t sound too bad does it? Enjoy.