Oh god these pancakes. Where to begin?
I think I’ll start from when I fell in love with red velvet for the first time. I had just moved to London in my teenage years and was having my first birthday celebration. One lovely lady got me these amazingly coloured cupcakes from Hummingbird Bakery as a gift, the famous red velvet cupcakes. It was love at first bite. See, I thought that red velvet was this incredibly magical flavour, but little did I know that it is, in fact, only chocolate and colouring! Mind.blown.
Anyways. Moving on from the fact that my world was shattered when I discovered it was only a chocolate cupcake that had been coloured, that actually meant that I could re-create it at home!
Which is exactly what I’ve done here with these pancakes. These are sooo delicious, you wouldn’t even believe they are healthy and full of goodness. Not a fake food colouring in sight! Instead we use the amazing, brightly coloured, and oh-so-versatile…. beetroot! Don’t worry though, these don’t taste like vegetables in the slightest. I actually got Matt to try and guess what I had used to get this colour and he was clueless.
I used a combination of banana, coconut flour, and eggs to get the dough just right and fluffy, and cacao powder for that hint of chocolate that isn’t to overpowering. I didn’t feel the need to add any extra sweeteners to the pancakes themselves, as you already get that from the bananas and the delicious chocolate-y maple syrup we’re going to drizzle it in.
Yep, you heard me. Chocolate. Maple. Syrup. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, it does!
So we’ve got some delicious healthy red velvet pancakes, and to take it to the next level we’re going to add a delicious dollop whipped coconut cream and then drizzle it with some decadent chocolate maple syrup. It sounds like a sugar explosion, but we don’t have any bit of refined sugar in sight!
These are actually simple to make, and can easily be doubled depending on how many guests you have over. You could even pre-steam the beetroots the night before and them simply blend the whole thing in the morning!
In fact, the red of the pancakes with the white of the whipped coconut cream make it super Christmas-y, so when the hoard of hungry relatives stampedes down for breakfast on Christmas morning, you know exactly what to feed them!
Happy brunching!