Carrot Cake Pancakes

Not particularly sweet, these Carrot Cake Pancakes are the kind of special breakfast you can feel good about serving your family. The batter is made by whisking flour with aromatic spices typically found in a carrot cake—spices like cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg. But to give these pancakes the characteristic fluffiness of a fat and crisp pancake, the recipe also uses buttermilk for both flavor and rise. To sweeten the batter, dissolve a modest amount of honey into the liquid ingredients. This lends the syrupy rich quality unique to honey that cane sugar cannot offer. After the dry and wet ingredients have been combined to form a smooth batter, fold in shredded carrot and shredded unsweetened coconut. As the pancakes fry in the pan, the batter lifts considerably, making an airy inside strewn with chewy-tender bites of carrot and coconut. The spices perfuming the batter are unmistakably reminiscent of carrot cake, but the savory quality of the pancakes makes them easy to cover in either maple syrup or (if you're feeling decadent) cream cheese frosting.