Root Beer Pancakes

One of the Irishman's favorite cookbooks is one that was published a couple of months ago by our local micro-brewery. Each recipe includes beer. There's beer chili and beer cheese soup; beer cake and beer pancakes. Wait, beer pancakes? That one gave me pause. Imagine as I might, I could not fathom how beer pancakes could possibly taste good. I mean maybe if they were made with ROOT beer...

And so it happened that I whipped up a batch of fluffy, moist root beer pancakes. I figured that root beer was simply a sweeter, non-alcoholic version of regular beer so the ratios should remain roughly the same. The only thing I had to increase was the amount of flour because the consistency was a bit runny for my taste. Anyway, they were so tasty, that I forewent the usual dousing of syrup that I usually drown my pancakes in and I elected to sprinkle them with powdered sugar instead. Delightful, no?

Here are the ingredients:

1.5 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder
1 cup root beer
1 egg, beaten
2 Tbs. butter, melted

Super simple - just mix together all of the dry ingredients and then add in the wet ingredients. Stir until the batter is no longer lumpy. I like it pourable, but not runny so I generally adjust the flour accordingly until it's where I want it.

I almost always use an electric griddle to cook pancakes because I can make 6 at a time and the flat, non-stick surface makes them nice and smooth. Once I pour the batter, I don't touch them until the sides of the pancakes are dry and air bubbles start rising to the surface in the middle. If you're using an electric griddle, 300 degrees is about right to get them golden brown.

As you can imagine, this recipe could be easily modified to use Coca-Cola or Cream Soda if that's what you have on hand. I like that there's minimal dairy (in the form of butter) since Parker has an intolerance to dairy and he also feels like he's getting a major treat just because there's root beer in there. Hmmm, perhaps I can modify a recipe to make root beer vegetables...