I have made so many good vegan pancake recipes, its hard to imagine improving on most of them, but I think I may just have with this recipe. Most, if not all of my pancake recipes use banana instead of eggs. I love this as it also replaces any sweetener and just generally turns out really well. However, on Christmas day, I decided to make pancakes for the family for breakfast and both my mum and dad can not handle banana. Mum gets very bad reflux from bananas and dad is on medication that prevents him from eating high potassium foods. So I had to improvise and came up with these fluffy yogurt pancakes. This is really a pretty basic classic pancake recipe that can be used with any flavour combinations desired. Since it was Christmas and we live in Australia, we, of course, could not go past decorating our pancakes with fresh cherries. You can not have an Australian Christmas without cherries. We also drizzles on some healthy vegan Nutella from Pana Organic and made a bit of a black forest pancake stack. It was amazing.
Although this recipe isn’t really about cherries, I am feeling inspired to write about cherries. Cherries are known to contain fairly high amounts of melatonin. Melatonin is produced from the amino acid tryptophan at night to help us sleep and various studies have shown that cherry juice can help aid sleep (1) I decided to do a little research on how melatonin affects women’s reproductive hormones and I was a little surprised at what I found.
- melatonin inhibits all female reproductive hormones: high levels of melatonin were associated with a delayed onset of puberty whereas low levels of melatonin were associated with earlier onset puberty.
- decreased melatonin production in summer (due to long days and short nights) coincides with higher fertility
- melatonin has a role in initiating puberty as well as menopause
- melatonin supplementation has been shown to boost progesterone
- there is an increase in melatonin throughout pregnancy with dropping levels in miscarriage and just before birth. (references below)
I find a lot of this information a bit contradictory but, it makes me think back to my community depression recovery training that taught us that too little sleep was just as bad as too much sleep. Sleeping over 9 hours a night can actually induce depression. It seems melatonin needs to be kept in a bit of a goldy locks area for things to function smoothly.
Now enough about melatonin and on to this easy recipe. The recipe will work with any yogurt, and it will work with 100% buckwheat flour. I just like the addition of spelt for taste, but if strictly gluten-free than just stick to buckwheat. The texture is very fluffy and delicious. I made mine with 1/3 cup measurements which turned out quite large but you can make them any size you like. They work well as little pikelets too or work really nicely with 1/4 cup measurement.
| Fluffy Vegan Yogurt Pancakes- No Banana | Print |
- 1 flax egg (1 TBSP ground flax seeds mixed with 3 TBSP water)
- 1 cup wholemeal spelt flour (or sub buckwheat for completely gf)
- 1 cup buckwheat flour
- ¼ cup cashew yogurt or yogurt of choice
- ¼ cup coconut sugar
- 2 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp baking soda
- pinch salt
- 2 cups almond milk
- Make the flax egg in a small bowl and set aside for a few minutes to gel.
- In a large bowl, mix together all of the ingredients until a pancake batter forms.
- Fry in ⅓ cup measurements in a little oil for a few minutes until the top bubbles and the edges brown slightly. Flip pancake and fry other side for a few more minutes until done.
- Repeat until batter is used up.
- Serve with melted chocolate, vegan nutella and cherries or toppings of choice
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1750-3841.14952
