Epic Fail Cinnamon Roll Pancakes

See that photo right there, yup that's right folks I was drawn in an lured by such deliciousness. A little bit of history here I'm a 'cinnamon roll' connoisseur. Where ever I've lived I made sure to find the best cinnamon rolls I could. I even worked at a cinnamon roll store when we lived in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii (I'll probably chat about that in a later post). Just recently I found divine cinnamon rolls here in Victoria, BC. Also when I have time on my hands I make my own but that is very rare these days but I'm getting off track here.  So you can see why I was lured by this divine looking recipe.

Dear readers to save you the agony of making the mistakes I did, with the help of my sister I'm going to explain why these disasters took place.  First I'll post the recipe so you can then understand why things slowly began to unravel in my two attempts to make these beauties. Now I'm not posting the link to the recipe in order to protect the innocent here, and the fact that I made some tweaks here (what else is new, and maybe that is why they didn't work, but I think not as my subs were pretty minor except the first time).

Cinnamon Roll Pancakes

• 4 C of flour
• 8 tsp of baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 4 C of milk (you can use alternatives to milk like almond, rice or hemp). I used almond milk and replaced the 4th cup with water
• 4 TSP of sunflower oil (another oil will work fine)
• 3 large eggs, lightly beaten
• little splash of vanilla extract
• nice bunch of coconut flakes

Mix dry and wet separately and then combine together.

(Pour into your pan in circles forming pancakes)

Filling

• 1 C of butter melted (you can sub with some coconut oil if you don't have any on hand)
• 1 1/2 C of packed brown sugar
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon

(Mix three ingredients together, put in baggie and snip one end and pour over batter in a swirl like motion)

There was a another part called Cream Cheese Glaze but in my opinion that is overload. They are great without it and we're saving calories here.  Okay now the fun part of making these precious things (insert sarcasm here).

The first time I made the batter I had a hard time getting the lumps out with a whisk. Yeah I could have gotten out the beaters I suppose but I was lazy so kept whisking. Well I decided to add water to thin out the batter because I really love crepes more then pancakes. So the batter ended up being too thin to work with. Then I made the filling exactly like written and put it in the bag but it looked like soup and I kept wondering how I was going to pour this out. So being the smart one I am I handed this off to my sister to deal with and then heard her moaning that something was terribly wrong with the recipe. Well this isn't in the recipe but put this in the fridge for at least 20-30 minutes. Once it firmed up it was a bit better to work with but a bit too thick to pour out. The other problem is the brown sugar kept burning on the pan when you go to flip the pancake. We ended up blobbing the topping on top and just eating it like that.

Second time around (what was I thinking to try this again?) I made the batter but didn't add any extra water and it was much thicker and easier to work with.  I didn't have any butter for the filling so thought I'd try coconut oil. Well the filling just ended up being to thick because the coconut oil just keeps absorbing in the sugar. Again we blobbed it on the top and this time it make this sort of crispy caramel like topping which was quite divine.

The pros: the base recipe works great, the filling try at your own risk or search for another filling. You can also make up your own filling like jam, pour on maple syrup (yup we are big into that in these parts), smear on peanut butter and top with bananas, use yogurt with a bit of honey. I could go on and on but I'll leave that to your imagination.

The cons: the brown sugar burns in the pan, on searching for an image I found a recipe that shows a teflon pan being used and we did not use a teflon one. If you use the filling don't sub butter for coconut oil unless you want a crispy like top that you can blob on.

Have you had any cooking disasters recently?

Michelle