Zizi's Adventures - Real Food, Real Stories

Mini Dorayaki – Japanese Pancakes with Adzuki Beans Paste

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Adzuki bean widely grown throughout East Asia and the Himalayas for its small (approximately 5 mm) bean. Sweetened azuki bean paste is used in a variety of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sweets. Whether used in bread or pastry fillings, sweet soups, pancakes, or ice cream, the essential adzuki bean is usually highlighted as the main flavor. Its assertiveness is best complemented with neutral ingredients but it is also common to add flavoring to the bean paste, such as chestnut. I don’t know if it is true but it is also said that an adzuki-flavored Pepsi product was released in Japan a couple of years ago. That’s interesting!

Make these pancakes on a lazy weekend when you have nothing else to do just staying in bed late, reading a good book, drinking a nice cup of hot tea and watching a great movie. These are my favourite programs to relax the hectic weekdays.

How do you relax?

Mini Dorayaki – Japanese Pancakes with Adzuki Beans Paste

Ingredients

For the pancake
– 1 and 1/4 cups white spelt flour, sifted
– 1/4 cup cold water
– 2 organic eggs

– 1/4 cup cane sugar
– 2 tablespoons honey
– 1 tablespoon sunflower oil plus 1 tablespoon for oiling pan
– 1 tablespoon mirin
– 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

For the adzuki beans paste
– 1 cup adzuki beans
– 3/4 cup cane sugar

Method

Soak the beans in three times their volume of cold water for a night before cooking. Drain, then put them in a pot of cold water again with the sugar; bring them gently to a boil and cook them until tender (45 minutes). Drain and mash the beans with fork or in a blender. If you have leftover, it freezes well.
Break eggs in a bowl and add sugar, honey, sunflower oil and mirin. With a whisk, beat the mixture by hand until light and fluffy. In a separate bowl, sift together all dry ingredients. Add dry into wet in batches, whisking in between. Once all combined, slowly add just enough water to form a smooth batter. Heat a pan over medium heat, add small amount of oil and spread with a piece of kitchen paper. Turn heat to low, pour enough batter to make a 9cm pancake then cover immediately with a lid and bake until small bubbles form on the surface and the bottom is nice and brown. Turn the pancake over and cook the other side. Repeat process to make about 36 pancakes(18 dorayaki). Fill one side of the pancake with azuki bean paste and sandwich with another pancake.

Vegan Coconut Oat Pancakes with Date Syrup, Coconut Chips and Clementine

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I love cozy Sunday mornings especially at winter times. Who doesn’t? If I have time I always make pancakes. I love pancake and it’s exciting for me to test new flours and new flavours. 
There are two new (for me) ingredients in this recipe: coconut flour and date syrup. Do you know any of them? 


Coconut flour is a gluten-free alternative to wheat that is rich in dietary fiber, which helps support your digestion, immune system and heart health. The flour is fiber from the coconut meat after most of the oil has been extracted. It can be added to standard wheat-based recipes to add extra fiber, by substituting 10-30% of the grain-based flour with coconut flour. It can also be excellent addition to shakes and smoothies where fiber and protein are needed. Since organic coconut flour contains natural sugar from the coconut meat, baked goods need less sugar added. 
Date syrup is an alternative sweetener, a thick, dark brown, very sweet syrup extracted from dates. It is used widely in the Middle Eastern countries. Date is a food of high nutritional value. It provides natural sugar in the form of glucose and fructose. It’s good to know that a 100 gram portion of fresh dates is a source of vitamin C and supplies 230 kcal (960 kJ) of energy.

Vegan Coconut Oat Pancakes with Date Syrup, Coconut Chips and Clementine

Ingredients (makes 8-10 pancakes)

– 1 cup white spelt flour
– 1/4 cup oat flour
– 1/4 cup coconut flour
– 2 tablespoons aluminium free baking powder
– 1 cup oat milk or almond milk
– 1 tablespoon date syrup
– 2 tablespoons coconut oil + for cooking
– 1 vanilla bean, split and seeded
– pinch of salt
– unsweetend coconut chips
– clementines

Method

In a bowl mix together the dry ingredients: flours, baking powder, salt. In another separate bowl mix together oatmilk, coconut oil, vanilla and date syrup. Give each mixture a stir then add the wet to the dry combining just until mixed. Set aside for 5 minutes to allow the batter to rise. Prepare a non-stick pan with 1 teaspoon oil on medium heat. Spoon batter into pan, forming a pancake. Cook until lightly brown on the bottom. Turn and brown the other side. Serve with clementines, coconut chips and more date syrup if you want.

Vegan Sugar Free Banana Coconut Pancake with Vanilla Coconut Cream

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After posting a sugar free chocolate cake here I am again with something yummie, vegan and also sugar free. The pancake is a simple vegan recipe (similar to the others I posted before) but the cream’s recipe comes from one of my favourite blogs, the Green Kitchen Stories. 
If you make this vanilla coconut cream your kitchen will smell heavenly. It is a real comfort, lazy breakfast on a Sunday morning.

Vegan Sugar Free Banana Coconut Pancake with Vanilla Coconut Cream

Ingredients (makes 8-12 pancakes)

For the pancake
– 1 cup white spelt flour
– 1/4 cup whole wheat spelt flour
– 1/2 cup shredded coconut (unsweetend)
– 2 tablespoons aluminium free baking powder
– 1 cup oat milk
– 1 ripe banana, mashed with a fork
– 1 vanilla pod, split and seeded
– pinch of salt
– coconut oil

For the vanilla coconut cream
– 400 ml (1 can) coconut milk
– 1 cinnamon stick
– 1 vanilla pod (you can use only the skin of the vanilla that was seeded for the pancake)
– 3 dates, pitted
– 1 small piece of ginger, peeled
– 2 tablespoons tapioca or corn starch

Method

In a bowl mix together the dry ingredients: flour, shredded coconut, baking powder and salt. In another bowl mash the banana then add oat milk, vanilla. Give each mixture a stir then add the wet to the dry combining just until mixed. Set aside for 10 minutes to allow the batter to rise.
Meanwhile make the coconut cream. Put coconut milk, cinnamon stick, ginger and vanilla in a pot. Let it boil on medium heat, while stirring, then turn down the temperature so that it simmers. In a small bowl mix the 2 tablespoons tapioca starch with 2 tablespoons water and add it to the coconut cream, cooking for another 20-25 minutes (occaisonally stirring). Drain the cream (removing the cinnamon stick, dates, ginger, vanilla pod) and set aside. 
Prepare a non-stick pan with 1/4 teaspoon coconut oil on medium heat. Spoon batter into pan, forming 2 small pancakes. Cook until lightly brown on the bottom. Turn and brown the other side. Serve the pancakes with the vanilla coconut cream.

Vegan Strawberry Buckwheat Pancake

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I made my first vegan pancake not long ago. Since then I tried different kind of flours with different kind of fruits. To be honest I had a few kitchen failures as well so I have to work on some of the recipes because they didn’t turn out how I wanted to. This strawberry buckwheat one was a complete success and the first time using buckwheat flour.
Buckwheat flour is flour ground from Fagopyrum esculentum, known more casually as buckwheat. It has a rich, earthy, nutty flavor and a very high nutritional value, making it popular in many nations, especially in Asia. In addition, buckwheat flour is gluten free, leading people with gluten intolerance to seek it out as a flour alternative. Buckwheat is an excellent source of protein. It is one of the few sources of plant protein that contain all 8 essential amino acids, in particular the amino acids lysine, threonine and tryptophan.
It is low in fat and high in fibre. It is also a good source of complex carbohydrate and has a low simple carbohydrate (sugar) content. Buckwheat is rich in iron, potassium, zinc, calcium, phosphorus, manganese, magnesium and selenium. It also contains the antioxidants vitamin E, rutin and quercitin.All things considered, that makes buckwheat and its flour a pretty healthy food.

Vegan Strawberry Buckwheat Pancake

Ingredients (makes 10 pancakes)

– 1 cup buckwheat flour
– 1/4 cup whole wheat spelt flour
– 2 tablespoons baking powder
– 1/2 vanilla bean, split and seeded
– 1 cup oatmilk
– 2 tablespoons sunflower oil + for cooking
– 1 tablespoon maple syrup + for serving
– pinch of salt
– 8 pieces of strawberries, cut in thin slices

Method

In a bowl mix together the dry ingredients: flours, baking powder, salt. In another separate bowl mix together oatmilk, oil, vanilla and maple syrup. Give each mixture a stir then add the wet to the dry combining just until mixed. Add the strawberry slices and mix it with the batter. Set aside for 5 minutes to allow batter to rise.

Prepare a non-stick pan with 1 teaspoon oil on medium heat. Spoon batter into pan, forming a pancake. Cook until lightly brown on the bottom. Turn and brown the other side. Serve with maple syrup and more strawberries.

Flour free Banana and Blueberry Pancakes

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I love making pancakes on lazy weekends. It’s so good not getting up early, not rushing to work. Instead of these I go to the kitchen, make the batter; then we sit down, eat the pancakes and just enjoy the delicious moment of the morning.
I found the recipe on one of my favourite healthy, vegetarian blogs, Green Kitchen Stories. I love David & Luise’s recipes that are so comforting, nutritious and oh so delicious. After making these pancakes I did a bit of searching on the Internet about berries and currants. There are so many of them, I didn’t even know about. In Hungary we ususally grow, use and eat strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries and redcurrants. These are the most known berries. I know about mulberries, lingonberries, jostaberries, whitecurrants and blackcurrants but these are difficult to find in markets. 
The most interesting ones I haven’t heard about: olallieberry (a cross between the loganberry and the youngberry, each of which is itself a cross between blackberry and another berry – raspberry and dewberry, respectively), loganberry (an octaploid hybrid produced from crossing a hexaploid apomictic blackberry and a tetraploid raspberry), youngberry (is a hybrid between a blackberry and a dewberry, both members of the genus rubus of the rose family, first cultivated in the western United States), dewberries (a group of species closely related to the blackberries, they are small brambles with berries reminiscent of the raspberry, but are usually purple to black instead of red), boysenberries (a cross between a European raspberry, a common blackberry and a loganberry), and pineberries (a strawberry cultivar owned by breeder Hans de Jongh and commercialized by VitalBerry BV in Made, The Netherlands, and publicized in Germany in April, 2009, as Ananaserdbeere, or white pineapple strawberry). Wikipedia still mentions a few like Pacific blackberry, Himalayan blackberry, Santiam berry, Chehalem blackberry and marionberry. Hope I can try all of them one day.

Did you know about all these kind of berries? Which is your favorite one?

Flour free Banana and Blueberry Pancakes

Ingredients (serves 2)

– 1,5 ripe bananas, peeled, mashed with a fork
– 3/4 cup blueberries (frozen)
– 3 organic eggs
– 60-70 g desiccated coconut
– 1 tablespoon cinnamon
– coconut oil

Method

In a bowl whisk the eggs then mix together with the bananas. Add desiccated coconut, cinnamon  and blueberries and stir it together. Prepare a non-stick pan with 2 teaspoons coconut oil on medium heat. Spoon batter into pan, forming 2 small pancakes. Cook until lightly brown on the bottom. Turn and brown the other side. Serve with blueberries, honey or maple syrup.