Experiment: Mac & Cheese Pancakes

Every now and then, I get these weird mac and cheese suggestions from folks and most of them I never really take the time to try out.

Then I saw a really straight-forward recipe for Mac and Cheese Pancakes as one of those Buzzfeed food hack how-to videos (embedded below).

I was intrigued and figured, hey, what the heck, why not.  It was simple enough.  Get some instant pancake mix, get some boxed mac and cheese and put them together.  What could go wrong?

I'll be honest, I had NO expectation about taste.  It was hard to determine if this was going to be a major failure or something new and awesome to continue making all the time.  I just figured, why not?  Worst that can happen is I have some wasted mix and mac.

So I watched the Buzzfeed video to try to figure out how much to use of each ingredient.  Unfortunately, they don't really give specifics on amounts, and after trying this out, the amounts they show would definitely be really off.

Mac And Cheese Pancakes
Posted by BuzzFeed Food on Sunday, September 27, 2015

So I gathered up my supplies and started making the mac and cheese, using a standard Kraft blue box.

Using Krusteaz mix, 2 cups whole milk and 1 cup cheddar cheese

Kraft Mac and Cheese

I decided to start conservatively.  I didn't use a full box of pancake mix, and though I cooked the full box of mac, I didn't expect to use all of it necessarily.  Once the mac and cheese was ready, I started an initial mix of the pancake mix using whole milk (like the video shows), and then came the mac and batter blend...

This where it started to seem a little more difficult.  I didn't want to have a bad mac to batter ratio so I added the mac and cheese in slowly at first.  Eventually, however, it seemed like I would need the whole box to match up to the batter, even though I hadn't even used a whole box of pancake mix (like the video seems to show).  After adding in the entire mac and cheese portion, I added a cup of shredded cheddar cheese (3 year aged Wisconsin cheddar).

Yum... Cheese...

Then, after mixing that all together, I started to cook on my non-stick griddle pan.  The video shows a greased pan being used, but I generally cook all my pancakes on a griddle, so I left out the oil.  I realize it might have been crispier if I had used oil, but I was willing to make that sacrifice.  I wasn't interested in a crispy glaze anyway. 

Weird.

Hmmm... skeptical...

Then, after cooking for a handful of minutes on each side, it was time to test it out...

Still weird.

It was... pretty awful.  It was super bland, I could hardly taste anything so it just tasted like.. blah.  I imagine that it may have needed less pancake mix, and I probably needed more shredded cheese.  I don't know if I'll ever really try this experiment again.  There's not too much motivation to do so.

It was fun to try though :)