Mia Makes: Whey Protein Pancakes (with 2-ingredients chocolate sauce)

 On a diet, but craving for pancakes? 
What if I tell you, you can get your pancake craving fixed (with chocolate chips!) at only 350 kcals and still get 27g of protein? Sounds too good to be true?

But it is! So let's get over with the ingredients, so we can get started!

25g whey protein powder (I'm using My Protein Impact Whey Isolate)
10g oat flour 
18g oat fibre (about 2 tbsps)
120g unsweeten applesauce
1 egg
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda

Optional:
20g dark chocolate chips
a little sugar to taste, if your protein powder is unflavoured. 

First up, separate your egg whites from yolk. Nope, we're not going to whip the whites, but somehow adding the whites separately at the very end will give you thicker, fluffier pancakes. Try it!

In a clean bowl, add in the yolk and applesauce and whisk until fully mixed. Then, add in all the dry ingredients (except the chocolate chips) and mix until there's no obvious pockets of dry flour. Then, add in the egg whites and chocolate chips and fold the mixture until there's no more obvious streaks of snotty egg whites floating around. You need not fully incorporate (and risk over-mixing your batter) the whites into the batter. 

Cook the batter over the hob on a non-stick pan, as you would with any other pancakes (eg. flipping when bubbles start to appear on the surface).
If you still don't know, the trick to get an evenly browned pancake is to NOT add oil/butter to your pan (hence it better be non-stick). Just give it a quick spray with some non-stick cooking spray and be sure to wipe off any excess oil (if you can SEE the droplets of oil, that's excess) with a kitchen towel before pouring in your pancake batter. 

Tadaa~
I've used milk tea flavoured whey protein powder, hence I've a stack of Milk Tea Chocolate Chip pancakes, YUM!

Protein pancakes made with whey protein powder will always turn out rather dry, so while this recipe will give you thick and "fluffy" pancakes, do not expect them to be moist and tender. But, comparing to a "traditional" whey protein pancake (especially those from protein pancake premix), this fare a lot better as the applesauce helps to make it a little more moist, while oat fibre tends to create this moist-mushy texture in baked goods.

I usually eat my pancakes with some maple flavoured syrup or peanut butter, but this time I thought of trying out a simple recipe for some chocolate sauce. 

You'll need:
3 tbsp cocoa powder 
1 tbsp honey
water (add enough to get the consistency you desire)

adapted from wholeheartedlylaura.com

While the consistency of the sauce was perfect (drippy, yet not too runny), the taste was pretty.... "healthy". Perhaps it will work better with more sweetener, or to use drinking cocoa powder instead of the unsweeten kind I've used. If you've tried this recipe using drinking cocoa powder and it turned out well for you, do let me know in the comments section below!

Till then,

Mia Foo