Picture it: lazy Sunday morning, the sun is shining, and you have a bit more time to spare of a morning compared to your normal routine.
Oatmeal has gotten old this week: breakfast today is going to be an event.
You might be a devotee of fitness and nutrition, but you need a break every once in a while. This doesn’t mean gorging yourself, but a balance between delicious-ness and nutrition is a great way to treat yourself.
Pancakes make for an easy, indulgent weekend brunch but they don’t even have to be unhealthy!
Today, you’ll learn five different ways to spruce up your pancakes: delicious and nutritious.
Zero Calorie Syrup™ and Coulis: The Obvious Choice
Pancakes and maple syrup are a staple combo.
The most famous way to enjoy this morning treat doesn’t have to commit you to sky-rocketing sugar intake.
Zero Calorie Syrup™ makes for an excellent alternative to maple syrup and comes in a wide variety of flavours too. They’re increasingly popular on the market and provide a way of enjoying your food without trashing the nutritional balance.
Fruit coulis could be another route to go down.
Easy to make at home, these sweet or tart syrupy reductions can be drizzled over your pancake stack to give them that little something extra.
Nuts and Seeds
A sprinkle of pumpkin seeds, a dash of chopped walnuts, or a handful of sunflower seeds. Or, go for all three?!
Nuts and seeds will add both a plethora of flavour and textures to your pancakes – as well as ALA and other important nutrients.
Here’s a vast variety of these super foods to choose from, so it’s down to you to grab a selection of your favourites and get creative. Mixing nuts with fruits and other syrups also makes total sense, since nuts are almost zero-sugar.
The nutrition profiles of nuts and seeds are great, providing you with proteins and healthy fats to kick start your day. You’ll be full and fuelled for hours.
Fresh and Dried Fruits
Whether you add sliced banana between the layers of your pancake tower, cover the whole thing in fresh berries, or prefer to bake raisins and dried blueberries right into the pancakes themselves, fruit may be the extra ‘wow-factor’ to your pancakes.
Adding fruit to your pancakes in any way, shape or form is an excellent way of getting kick started on your 5-a-day and boosting up the vitamin content of your brunch.
Peanut Butter and Other Spreads
This option is the perfect solution for not just one, but two age-old pancake dilemmas:
- How do I make my pancakes more exciting?
- How do I stack my pancakes up to look amazingly photogenic?
The answer: spreads.
From peanut butter to jams, spreadable foods are your pancakes’ best friends. They make for excellent ‘tower-glue’, combine perfectly with a few of our other suggestions.
Try incorporating these with fruit and the brunch you’re cooking up will be a great source of energy and look great.
You can experiment with classic combinations like banana-peanut butter or lean on some of the BULK POWDERS® chocolate roasted hazelnut butter.
Change up the Batter
Why limit your pancake-pimping to just toppings? That’s only 5% of the whole thing.
One of the best ways to make your pancakes that little bit extra-special is to make a few creative changes to the pancake batter itself. This is making up the bulk of your pancakes, so it can change everything!
Adding fruit to your batter is something we’ve already mentioned, but how about cacao nibs? Cocoa powder? Or replacing some of the milk in the batter with strawberry yoghurt?
These provide a totally different experience, while a combination of natural yoghurt and banana can maximise the nutritional benefits of your pancakes.
Getting adventurous in the kitchen and curating your own special pancake recipe that’s completely spot-on for your own personal tastes is definitely worth your while – no matter if it takes a little bit of experimentation to get it exactly right.
Protein Pancake Batter
Obviously, if you don’t feel like experimenting with banana-yoghurt pancakes, or shooting your sugar intake up, you can get a high-quality protein pancake mix.
This offers a way of getting the very most from your pancakes without sacrificing the taste or nutrition. You can get a ridiculous 36g of protein per serving, with all the taste and texture of a normal pancake.
This is a simple, cheap, and effective hack to get the most from your Sunday brunch.
Final Thoughts
Each of the suggestions we have made above are fantastic additions to make to your pancakes on an individual basis.
These methods are all great individually, but the real fun comes from experimenting with these tips. Try different combinations and see what works for you and your needs.
Pancakes with blueberries baked in, stacked up with bananas, peanut butter and a drizzle of calorie free syrup to top it off? Chocolate batter pancakes stacked up using dark chocolate spread and smothered in a healthy helping of black-current coulis?
Decadent but – with protein pancake mix – they’re still not cheat meals.
It might take some time to become a true pancake master, but when you have so many options – and when the results are this good – it’s worth taking your time to practice.
On a more serious note: fitness and good nutrition aren’t about restricting yourself from the things you love. The best approach is simply finding stuff that fits your diet and allows you to enjoy yourself in a healthier way – it supports your taste buds and your goals.
So get in the kitchen, crack out the frying-pan and get flipping. Give some of these pancake-sprucing ideas a try and let us know your results – as well as any combinations you love!
