This recipe makes a fluffy, delicately crispy, and comforting cornbread pancake. My ideal pre-Thanksgiving pancake (but we also eat them in summer with fresh peaches, whipped ricotta, and maple syrup!)
One of our Thanksgiving must-haves is cornbread. Even more, we love making it for breakfast! As pancakes!
Why a Cornbread Pancake?
It is better as pancakes than as cornbread.
May seem a little crazy, but follow my logic here. What is the best part of the cornbread? The crispy buttery part? What if you just had a little bit of the soft part, and the rest was crisped up with butter????
The story behind these pancakes is that I was living alone during law school. I wanted cornbread. Earlier that month, I had encountered near disaster when I had been craving a chocolate cream pie and decided to make myself one. So it was just me, and the chocolate cream pie cooling down and waiting to go in the refrigerator to set. We stared each other down. No one would know if I had a little taste early . . .
In the end, I ate so much I nearly made myself sick, and I had to throw out the rest of the pie so that I wouldn’t keep eating it. Ugh now I want another chocolate cream pie. That thing was delicious. Although a little rich, if you eat more than a slice, or, well, most of the pie. I think the cooling would have taken the edge off the richness as well.
Back to the cornbread situation, I decided that making an *entire* recipe for something extremely delicious was not something I had the self control to handle while living alone. (This is why I had three children; depending on the voracity of their appetites, I may need a fourth child.)
So I thought, couldn’t I make half of the recipe instead? Even better, maybe just a quarter? But what baking dish would I cook it in? No baking dish was small enough for a 1/4 recipe.
How about in a small frying pan with loads of butter?
Starting with the Jiffy Cornbread Pancake Recipe
The first iteration of these cornbread pancakes involved Jiffy cornbread mix. I basically followed the box, but used 2/3 cup of buttermilk instead of 1/3 a cup of milk. (I thinned the batter a bit to get less of a cakey pancake.) The Jiffy cornbread pancake results were very delicious.
(My love of the Jiffy cornbread mix has been previously discussed and has led to other creations.) But after I had kids, I looked at the label and saw, like, a lot of ingredients. And if you look up Jiffy Cornbread Mix on the Environmental Working Group’s food scores website (they evaluate nutrition, additives, and processing), it has a whopping 10/10 — the worst score possible score. So yeah, wasn’t making the beloved Jiffy Cornbread pancakes for my babies, no matter how delightful Jiffy made my childhood.
But I was ABSOLUTELY going to be feeding them cornbread. Cornbread is delicious. And this cornbread pancake situation has surpassed my love for cornbread. So below is my recipe for cornbread pancakes.
Made with Honey, not Sugar
Quick note on sweeteners: I usually try not to use sugar when I cook. The times I do use it are when I think there’s going to be a chemical issue or it just isn’t quite right without the sugar.
If there’s no chemical issue, I try to use sweeteners that have as little processing as possible for the most part. So that means things like honey, maple syrup, dates, etc. When I use a natural sweetener, I still try to use as little as possible without sacrificing the flavor. So these cornbread pancakes are sweetened with just honey — no sugar.
What to Eat With These Buttermilk Cornbread Pancakes?
These are delicious with Orange Fennel Chicken Breakfast Sausages.
Or top them with whipped ricotta and no-sugar homemade jam!
Print
Cornbread Pancakes with Buttermilk
- Total Time: 20 minutes
- Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
Wet Ingredients
Dry Ingredients
Instructions
1. Prepare the wet ingredients.
Melt the 1/2 cup of butter, then mix in the 1/2 cup of honey. Stir to combine well.
Add the 2 eggs (I crack them directly into the butter and honey and just scramble them into the honey butter mixture). Then add the 1 1/8 cup of buttermilk.
2. Prepare the dry ingredients.
Add to the wet ingredients in the following order, waiting to mix everything together until all dry ingredients are in the bowl. Everything will kind of just sit on the top of the wet ingredients. Doing it this way will ensure that you don’t have some dry ingredients that don’t thoroughly mix into the batter — the alternative is just to mix the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl and then add them to the wet ingredients, but who has time for that?
- 1 cup cornmeal
- 1 cup all purpose flour
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
Use a dry whisk or spatula to first gently combine the salt/baking soda/baking powder with some of the flour and cornmeal at the top of the bowl. Try to do this without incorporating any wet ingredients.
Then mix everything together with the whisk until thoroughly combined.
3. Fry up some pancakes.
Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a nonstick frying pan over medium heat. I try to give the pan 1-2 solid minutes to preheat before putting in any pancakes. I’ve found that if I don’t take the time to do this, the pan temperature changes as I cook my pancakes and I end up with some that are more burned than I’d like. The butter should have completely melted and started to foam up before you add the pancakes. If it doesn’t sizzle when you add the batter, the pan isn’t hot enough. They are ready to flip when little bubbles rise to the tops of the pancakes in the center (see image below). Once you flip them over, remember the second side cooks much, much faster! I usually give them about 30 seconds, no more than 1 minute, on the second side.
4. Enjoy!
- Prep Time: 5 min
- Cook Time: 15 min
- Category: Breakfast
- Method: stovetop
