My girlfriend Jenny calls pancakes “breakfast dessert,” and she regularly orders one a la carte in addition to her main breakfast at restaurants. For dessert.
Although I reach for savory breakfast most times, sometimes a pancake just HITS.
I can get swept up in breakfast dessert mania too. They’re basically free to make, I always have all the ingredients, and they can feed boys who never get full. Who can explain this to me? Why do they eat first and second dinner, late-night dinner, first breakfast, and also breakfast dessert?
Peach corn cakes are a delightful twist on the usual suspects. Corn cakes + syrup + coffee alone makes this recipe worth it, but add the peaches, and every bite is pure joy.
(Excerpted from Feed These People)
INGREDIENTS
- 3/4 cup flour
- 3/4 cup coarse yellow cornmeal
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1-1/4 cups buttermilk
- 3 tablespoons butter, melted
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I will not be mad if you fudge this higher)
- 2 cups diced peeled fresh ripe peaches (You can also swap blueberries or bananas or whatever)
- Butter, for serving
- Warm maple syrup, for serving
DIRECTIONS
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk the buttermilk, melted butter, eggs, and vanilla until totally combined.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones, and whisk until smooth and gorgeous. Add a cup or so of the diced peaches to the batter and stir to combine. Save the rest for topping, because pancake decorations are pretty.
Corn cakes love butter with all their heart. Think of how much cornbread loves butter, and now you understand its needs. So onto a hot griddle, add a bunch of butter to fry these in. There is no quantity except “a lot” so just work that out.
Ladle 1/4 cup of the batter for each corn cake onto the griddle, and flip when it is bubbly on top and nice and brown on the bottom, 3 to 4 minutes. Fry on the other side for another couple of minutes until browned, and keep the corn cakes in a warm oven until you’re through all the batches. Or transfer them directly onto the plates the teen boys are standing there holding.
Top with a little scoop of the fresh peaches and some warm maple syrup. Do I add additional butter on top? I do. The surprising bite of warm peaches inside the crunch of the corn cake batter? I’d order this as breakfast and breakfast dessert 100 times out of 100.