Homemade Pancakes – Made Easy

Guest post from Nicole Beard

If a before school or weekend pancake breakfast makes you roll your eyes and sigh, thinking of all the hard work – have no fear! If you are like me and looking for ways to not only eat healthier, less processed foods, but also save money, then this is a great solution for any pancake lovers in your clan!

Homemade Pancakes Made Easy!

You’ll need a container to put the pancake mix in – either a new one from the store (just a few dollars should do it) or recycle a container from an item in your home! You can also use a gallon sized storage bag, but I figure a recycled container is much easier and you can clean and reuse it for a longer period of time.

You will want to write your wet ingredients on a note card to tape to your container, so you can just pull the container from the pantry and look at the note card for the wet ingredients you’ll need to add, as well as the amount of the mix to put in.

I used an amalgamation of recipes that I had in cookbooks or online (I say amalgamation because I used some basic ingredients and measurements but added some other stuff and omitted some things too!) Following is the recipe I use, feel free to use your own favorite pancake recipe. You can certainly make it healthier by adding wheat flour or different sugar. The following recipe yields about a dozen pancakes. You’ll want to repeat the dry ingredients until you fill your container of choice – for me, I did it 8 times and it went to near the top, leaving me enough room to shake it all around.

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 Tablespoon white sugar
• 2 Tablespoons ground flax seed

I put in 1 1/2 “heaping” cups of the mix when I’m making this. The recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups, so I figure with the added dry ingredients a “heaping” cup should do.

Wet Ingredients (written on note card):

• 2 cups milk
• 1 egg
• 3 Tablespoons butter, melted
• shot of vanilla extract

Store bought pancake mix, besides being processed food, costs around $3-$5 per box depending on the brand. I love the fact that I am saving money by using ingredients I already have on hand and buy frequently for other homemade items and that I know exactly what’s going into my pancakes! Making the mix ahead of time cuts down on having to measure out all the ingredients and puts this homemade pancake mix on par with the store bought variety for ease of use.  Now the syrup, I’ll work on that later 🙂

Do you make your baking mixes? I’d love for you to share your recipes with me!