Chocolate Cake Pancakes

5.00 stars from 94 reviews

We have several pancake recipes to choose from, but we've never regretted choosing chocolate as a flavor for anything, including pancakes. These taste great just as pancakes without the frosting too, so if you want a quicker easier chocolate fix, just make the pancakes without bothering with the frosting. Chocolate cake pancakes are a delicious breakfast especially popular with chocoholics. For someone who likes chocolate cake, this is a tasty meal to start their day with.

It's also a healthy breakfast if you use honey instead of sugar as the ingredients suggest. Honey produces a less firm frosting, but since these are pancakes, this texture works well for quickly and easily spreading with a knife or your fork.

These are the best tasting chocolate pancakes we've ever had, but you can also put this batter into a pancake pen to make pancake art. That affiliate link goes to the pancake pen we recommend because it has a wide mouth for easy batter pouring and the lid is strong enough to stay on when you squeeze batter out of it. You can run it through a blender before putting it in your pancake pen to make extra sure it's smooth. If your goal is art and not amazing flavor, but you want dark chocolate colors, you can instead make the pancake art recipe and just add cocoa powder and blend it. This should give you better control over the images you draw. There's nothing wrong with using this recipe though to knock your guests' socks off with not only fun art but also amazing flavor.

Ingredients for the chocolate pancakes

SERVES 4

• 2 cups flour. Use regular or if you want gluten-free, use casava flour
• 1 cup cocoa powder, unsweetened
• 2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup of milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup honey. Substitute 1 and 3/4 cups sugar and mix with dry ingredients if you're more concerned about cost than health or don't have that much honey.
• 1/2 cup melted coconut oil. Use a vegetable oil if you don't have coconut oil.
• 2 eggs
• OPTIONAL: Chocolate chips only if you're a major chocoholic.

Ingredients if adding optional chocolate frosting

SERVES 4

• 1 1/2 cup butter
• 1 cup cocoa powder, unsweetened
• 1/2 cup of milk. If you want to use a milk substitute such as almond milk, you may want to use sugar instead of honey to prevent runny frosting or go with just a spoonful of honey if you're really into health. Really you can keep it as-is with almond milk and go with the runnyness. It'd be like a mix between syrup and frosting and both of those would be delicious on these pancakes.
• 1 cup honey. If you value cost over health and/or want your frosting to be more firm, substitute 2 3/4 cups of sugar in place of honey
• 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions for the optional chocolate frosting

1. Add cocoa powder to a mixer. Cream the butter together with the cocoa powder. Add the vanilla extract as they mix.
2. Slowly add the milk and honey to the cocoa butter mixture as follows: add a tablespoon of milk followed by roughly a 1/4 cup of honey and combine. Turn mixer to a high speed for about a minute. Repeat until all the milk and honey are mixed in.
3. Set aside until your pancakes are ready to eat. If you have extra frosting, you can refrigerate and use it on other foods later in the week. For instance, you can also use this frosting to top pancakes from our quick pancake recipe too.

Directions for the chocolate pancakes

1. Add cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, flour and salt into a bowl or stand mixer. Mix the ingredients together until well combined.
2. Add milk, honey, coconut/vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla to flour mixture and mix together on medium speed until well combined.
3. Reduce speed and slowly add boiling water to the pancake batter until well combined.
4. Cook as you would regular pancakes.
5. Serve these delicious chocolate pancakes however you'd like, including with the optional frosting.

Chocolate cake pancakes are a delicious healthy breakfast that tastes like a dessert.

Here are some common questions people have related to chocolate cake pancakes:

Why do you add boiling water to the mix?

The boiling water helps emulsify the ingredients, but more importantly, it reacts to the cocoa powder, baking soda and the baking powder. The cocoa powder reaction intensifies the chocolate flavor by blooming and hydrating it. The baking soda and baking powder do their usual thing of bubbling up and causing fluffier pancakes as we cover in the Q&A from our quick pancake recipe. Adding the boiling water will also make the pancakes more moist and helps them last longer before spoiling. We find that if you skip the boiling water, you'll mostly notice the pancakes are not as moist. They'd still taste good though.

Our linked Q&A covers baking soda and powder reactions, but if you want to know more about chocolate blooming and emulsifying, you can read this NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology pdf and even conduct the experiments if you'd like.

Why do you use honey instead of sugar?

Honey has a lot of positive health effects and it works great for this recipe both in flavor, appearance and texture. Honey makes for a runnier frosting, which is easier to spread on pancakes. This is especially true for people who want to eat pancakes with just a fork and not a knife. There are quite a few other reasons to use honey. According to Menuka Corner, honey "adds air to baked goods keeping them moist, contributes to browning, and adds chewiness and crispness. And each honey varietal imparts a different flavour to your baking".

Is pancake batter the same as cake batter?

PancakeArtwork.com's chocolate cake pancakes recipe is proof that they can be the same. The name "pancakes" breaks down to "pan" and "cakes", or in other words, they are cakes made in a pan. Though you can make them the same, in our culture there are commonly differences. In practice, pancakes are used in our culture as a breakfast food that's eaten on a regular basis and cakes are made as a dessert for special occasions. Because of this, they tend to the same ingredients but usually have different proportions. Most commonly, cakes tend to be loaded with more sugar and pancakes tend to have less.

We've bridged the gap with this recipe by inventing a cake recipe, but we use honey instead of sugar for a taste that's like cake, but a health content that can be eaten with the similar regularity of common pancakes. You should be able to bake this recipe into a cake if you wanted. If anyone doubts that cake and pancake batter can be the same, send them to this chocolate cake pancakes recipe which has successfully proven that they can be the same.