Week 6 - Trick or Treat Pancakes

11/3/12 - For some reason every year for Halloween, I buy way more candy for trick or treaters than we need to.  I guess I don't want to be that house that runs out of candy and has to shut off its lights halfway through the night.

So every year I have the dilemma of having a lot of leftover sweets.  Usually, I just take it in to work to share with people, but this year I thought I'd do something different.  Since I'm on this 52 pancake mission, why not find a creative way to use some of the candy?  So here's my take on Halloween flavored pancakes.
I used M&Ms (afterall they're great in cookies), Whoppers (will add a nice surprising crunch), and Heath bars (just curious what this would be like).  My husband's favorite was the Heath bar pancake, you just need to make sure you don't over cook it or the candy will burn.  I was rather fond of the Whopper pancake because of the nice crunch it had.  The M&M pancake was tasty too, but the candy coating melted pretty quickly in the batter.  It did give the batter a nice swirl of color though.

Colorful swirls in the M&M pancake

I used the same pancake base as last week (see week 5's post) only I ran out of buttermilk and used fat free milk instead.  I think this was a mistake as the batter was runnier and the pancakes were nowhere near as fluffy as last week.  But I do recommend experimenting with various candy you may have left over and enjoy a little sugar high this weekend.  Jó étvágyat!

Candy overload!

Ingredients:
1/4 cup M&Ms
1/2 cup Whoppers
1/2 cup Heath bars

Directions:
1. Prepare pancake batter per instructions from Week 5.
2. Divide batter into 3 separate bowls.
3. Mix the M&Ms into one of the bowls of batter.
4. In a food processor pulse the whoppers until crumbs form.  Put the Whoppers in a bowl and set aside.
5. Pulse the Heath bars in a food processor and mix into one of the bowls of batter.
6. Heat a griddle or pan on medium heat and use butter to coat the griddle/pan.
7. Ladle M&M batter onto the griddle/pan.  When bubbles begin to set around the edges of the pancake, gently flip and continue to cook for 1 to 2 minutes being careful not to let the candy burn.  Do this until you run out of the M&M batter.
8. Ladle the plain pancake batter onto the griddle/pan and sprinkle the ground up Whoppers on top.  When bubbles set around the edges, gently flip and continue to cook for 1 to 2 minutes.  Again, be careful not to let the candy burn.  Repeat until you run out of the batter.
9. Ladle the Heath bar batter onto the griddle/pan.  When bubbles begin to set around the edges of the pancake, gently flip and continue to cook for 1 to 2 minutes being careful not to let the candy burn.