Cake Pop Protein Pancakes

It’s been two years since the hot cakes have rolled out of the pan and onto this blog and quite frankly, the world certainly looks different than it did in 2019. Let’s address the elephant in the room and talk about the fucking pandemic.

One would think with a year trapped inside I’d have documented some dope ass pancakes, but you’d be wrong. I did make a few batches, but quite frankly I got sucked down the entire cooking and baking spectrum in addition to spending every last second on my back porch while the weather was accommodating. Now that the weird-ass COVID holidays are over and the doldrums of winter have clapped my Midwestern asscheeks, I felt compelled to get the griddle nice and hot again.

The amount of time I’ve spent doom scrolling on my phone during 2020 is an unknown number; only because I turned off the screen time report after a few weeks of locally mandated lockdowns to spare myself the guilt. One point of interest that came of all of that scrolling was the subreddit r/VolumeEating, in which people post gargantuan amounts of food at low caloric totals. Folks are literally trying to bloat themselves into satiation and I’m here for it.

For example, my new favorite post-dinner “dessert” is a bunch of Greek yogurt mixed with almond milk, protein powder, sugar-free pudding mix and psyllium husk; aka “prot yog.” There are all types of recipes in which [insert food] has the adjective “protein” tacked on because it’s a thing we can do to counteract the fact that the majority of the 200 steps we’ve taken in a day are from our couch to the kitchen.

Lucky for me, I have a partner that loves to bring random leftovers and cast offs from her CSA / refrigerator. Sometimes it’s fruit in a plastic shopping bag that has juice leaking out of it and other times it’s vegetables that have already been cut up, and seemingly dried out. It’s always a crapshoot, but I appreciate it none the less.

Recently, she brought over a baggie of what appeared to be a shit load of coke, but was instead cake pop protein powder. I hadn’t made pancakes in quite a while, so I decided to “treat” myself with my non-cocaine protein powder. A simple recipe for a simple mind, it’s a quick cake-job with nothing more than flour, protein powder, baking soda/powder, an egg, almond milk and Greek yogurt.

After mixing the dry into the wets, letting it rest and dropping batter in a hot pan, I was surprised to see how fluffy they became. Once they were removed from the pan, they also became shiny, which is fine because it’s 2021 and my pancakes are free to express themselves any way they’d like.

On the subject of shiny pancakes, I’ve learned that baking with low-cal / no-cal substitutes often has plastic-y or overly artificial results and quite frankly, these were no different. I would even call them slightly “elastic” and probably over-sweet due to the cake pop flavor.

These protein pancakes power-bottomed some homemade maple syrup I received in a mason jar from a friend while visiting family back in Wisconsin. Truly a barnyard plate, the syrup actually felt savory in contrast to the cakes, leveling out the sweet factor with a smoky, roasty flavor. Great if you’re into satiating but diabetes-inducing breakfast.

This batch made 8 decent sized non-cocaine, plasti-cakes with 45 total grams of protein. I am so sated, I haven’t eaten in the four days since. I will probably never have to eat again.