Recipe #39: Cinnamon Roll Pancakes

The problem with being so far behind in blogging is that I’m having a hard time recalling specific things about certain recipes. This one, the only thing I can truly recall is what a royal pain it was…

Cinnamon Roll Pancakes

I thought, *thought*, this would be a quick week night dinner to try. Basic pancake batter with a cinnamon-sugar-butter swirl, how hard is that? Pancakes were a piece of….nevermind, they were really easy. The cinnamon-sugar mixture wasn’t hard either, the problem came with putting it on the cake.

If you have ever made blueberry pancakes, then you know the easiest way is not to add the berries to the batter, but to put plain batter in the pan and as one side cooks, sprinkle some berries on the still doughy side, then flip. These work on the same idea. You put the batter in the pan, then do a swirl of cinnamon-sugar mixture, then flip. Sounds easy enough. Nope. She writes in the blog that you have to get the mixture just right, letting it sit at room temperature, mixing it up to keep the butter mixed in…all that. I still could not get the mixture to come out of the bag without glopping all over or clogging because it was too thick and not coming out at all. That was problem #1.

Problem #2. When you flip the pancake to cook the other side… well there is this thing called gravity. Flipping them is easy, but once you do… your lovely swirl that you work painstakingly hard to get out of the stupid piping bag then goes on to pan. Butter and sugar do one thing very well together… caramelize… which can be yummy and wonderful, it’s also approximately half a degree away from BURNING. This does leave you with a really, really cool gap in the pancake since it holds the “Swirl shape”. But this also means that my pan is now covered with burnt butter and sugar what was previously in my pancake. I mix cinnamon, sugar, and butter together, I want to eat it! Not spend 20 minutes soaking it off my pan.

Around the 3rd pancake…. while my kitchen is filling with smoke, (Keep in mind, the pancakes themselves are not burnt, they are quite lovely, it’s only the remnants of the butter and sugar that are trying to catch fire) I yell to Matt, “I do not care if these are the best pancakes we have ever eaten, I am NOT making these again.”

I made 6 in total, topped with the cream cheese glaze, and took a picture of the prettiest ones for the blog. Grumbling and cranky at the whole thing, I finally take a bite. They were good, and they did taste like cinnamon rolls despite the layer still on my pan. Texturally, the gap made by the escaping filling was actually pretty cool.

Matt turned to me and said, “You know, these are pretty dang good.” “No they ar… … …Yeah, they are dang it. Still, don’t get attached!!” Then I spent the next 30 minutes cleaning my kitchen….