Pumpkin Pancakes

I love cooking and I love pumpkin... so you guessed it, that means we make a lot of pumpkin flavoured things around here! Our most recent pumpkin treat was pumpkin pancakes. Made from scratch these pancakes are wonderfully healthy, deliciously moist, and they freeze and re-heat well too. It's also a great way to sneak some extra veggies into your little ones!

These pancakes are a big hit with the boy-o too because he loves finger foods and being able to feed himself. Because of all the spices in them they're quite flavourful even without any toppings added.

Here's the recipe:

Pumpkin Pancakes

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 cup canned pumpkin purée (not pumpkin pie filling)
1 1/4 cups whole milk
1 egg
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Vegetable oil

Directions:

1. Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger and sugar in a large bowl. Set it aside.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the pumpkin with the milk, egg and melted butter. Slowly add the wet mix into the dry ingredients and stir to combine. Allow the batter to rest at room temperature for 20-30 minutes.
3. Heat a large frying pan over medium-low heat and add just enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan, allowing it to heat for 2 to 3 minutes.
4. Cook pancakes of your desired size until bubbles appear in the center, then flip them once and continue cooking until no longer doughy in the center.


These pancakes are amazingly delicious with some maple syrup added on, but you can play around to find your favourite flavour combinations. And don't forget, you can freeze any leftovers in a freezer safe food storage bag and simply pop thawed pancake into the toaster to re-heat them.

Fall Fun: Pumpkin Patch

Last weekend we started off Fall right by taking a trip out to a pumpkin patch. We had a lot of fun, and they had all kinds of neat decorations made with hay bales and signs. The boy-o loved running around in the field and he kept trying to pick up the pumpkins with his strong man grunts. The pumpkin patch also had all kinds of varieties that I'd never seen before--some of my favourites were the "warty pumpkin" and some gourds that looked like flowers and jelly fish.

They had hay bales painted to look like different things too. They had a rooster one, a spider, a group of three pumpkins, and some angry birds ones! Definitely some creative decorations for sure. They also had a corn maze and a pumpkin lawn bowling section where you tried to knock down 2L pop bottles by rolling a pumpkin at them!

My sister was down visiting last weekend, so we made a big group family trip out with my parents too. They provide you with huge wagons to load your pumpkins in, and the boy-o was pretty determined that he wanted to help push!

And like all good farms they had some painted cut-outs too! We look pretty spooky don't you think?

It was a really great way to start off the Fall season for us, and hopefully we'll get a chance to go apple picking sometime soon too. We've already put some of the pumpkin to good use making pumpkin pancakes! Mmmmm.....