Gingerbread Pancakes with Eggnog Cream Cheese

I love the easy, lazy mornings over the Christmas break. If you are lucky enough to be off your work for a few days in between Christmas and New Year, you’ll know what I mean. I think it takes me back to being a child when I had lots of time off school.

You get up in your jimjams, heating on, and pop on you’re the Christmas tree lights then settle down to watch naff Christmas telly. Usually repeats of old festive episodes of BBC comedies. That’s what we do anyway!

And breakfast, which is my favourite meal of the day, has to be extra special during this time I think. Instead of hoovering up the content’s of a recently received selection box, I like to indulge. We actually have bacon rolls on Christmas morning, and after that I try and make different things such as an After Eight inspired cereal I made a couple of years ago.

But this year, I plan on making more of these gingerbread pancakes. I have tried them already, just so I know they will be a hit with Disneyboi. And they will be. They have all the familiar gingerbread spices you would expect, such as ginger, cloves and cinnamon. Plus some treacle which gives a dark earthy flavour and makes the pancakes a nice rich brown colour.

If that wasn’t enough, I decided to make an eggnog flavoured cream cheese (I know, I know, I’m going eggnog crazy this year!). This cream cheese is the same filling which I used in my eggnog stuffed chocolate cups the other week (grab the recipe here). Like I said a bit of indulgence, but if you can’t do this at Christmas time, then when can you?

Yield: 10 small pancakes

Ingredients:

100 grams plain flour

30 grams granulated sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon ground ginger

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground cloves

1 medium egg

180 ml milk (I used semi-skimmed)

1 tablespoon groundnut oil

1 ½ tablespoon treacle
(Adapted from Williams-Sonoma and Taste of Home)

Method:

Whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder and spices together in a bowl. In a jug, combine the egg, oil, milk and treacle. Keep stirring until the treacle blends into the rest of the ingredients. Add the wet mix to the dry mix and blend just until combined. Don’t over mix.

Heat a frying pan over medium heat and grease very lightly with a little butter or vegetable oil.  Add a heaping dessert spoon to the pan and let cook until bubbles start to appear on top of the pancakes then flip and leave for another minute. Do not press down with a spatula as you want them light an airy.

You can keep the pancakes cosy in a 100C oven, on a baking sheet, until you are ready to enjoy them.

To serve, enjoy with butter, maple syrup or as I did – eggnog flavoured cream cheese. Now, go and enjoy them in front of the TV with your feet up!