Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Pancakes

While I love a good old-fashioned buttermilk pancake, there’s a special place in my heart for over-the-top pancakes. My family has an annual Fat Tuesday tradition (oh, there’s a special place in my heart for holidays named with the word “Fat“, too) of going to IHOP for dinner, and I always choose whatever ludicrously sweet and decadent pancake platter they happen to be featuring that year. There have been glaze-glossed cinnamon roll inspired pancakes so sweet I couldn’t finish them, cheesecake filled pancakes with strawberry sauce, Oreo studded pancakes, and more, but I’m being honest when I say I’ve never had a pancake as deliciously decadent as these homemade peanut butter chocolate chip pancakes.

Peanut butter has the real potential to weigh down these pancakes, but it doesn’t because we take a few preventative steps. First, we warm the peanut butter just enough to make it less viscous and more whisk-able. You’ll gently stir it into your liquid ingredients and then whisk well (otherwise you’ll have peanut butter streaks through your pancakes, and while that’s really not the worst thing that could happen, let’s try to avoid it). When you combine your wet and your dry ingredients, do so with an extremely light hand (this is good practice for any pancakes, but especially so for peanut butter ones). A few specks of visible flour left in the batter is OK. The end result is ever-so-slightly heavier than your typical buttermilk pancake, perhaps, but they still maintain that lightness and fluffiness that’s critical for a good chocolate chip pancake.

They’re light, fluffy, but definitely a bit more… extreme… than your average buttermilk pancake. These peanut butter chocolate chip pancakes are decadent, and to make them even more so, I highly recommend that you bypass regular maple syrup and dress your pancake stack instead in chocolate syrup and melted peanut butter, chocolate chips and whipped cream. Makes my heart flutter just thinking about it. Maybe that’s just my arteries, though.

Do you have any Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras food traditions? A lot of people in my area go crazy for fastnachts… I’ve actually never had one so I’m hoping to get my hands on one this year.