the best kind of homemade gift...

...is dessert and breakfast in one. I could've sworn I'd mentioned before how much my dad loves carrot cake but I can't find a single entry to back me up. Anyway, he does. But he's also stopped eating cake since he started eating healthier and I wanted to respect that for Father's Day. It just so happened that a month or two ago I tore this recipe for Carrot Cake Pancakes with Sweetened Yogurt out of a magazine (don't ask me which, it's long gone) with plans to use it eventually. Obviously Father's Day was the perfect time. One of the aspects of the recipe that I was attracted to was the boiled carrots. Yes, really. If you've ever made a carrot cake, you know what a pain it is to grate carrots. So boil and puree with the wet ingredients? Yes, please! (And even so, there's still visible bits of carrots in the finished pancakes, if that's important to you.) Bonus? It turns your batter orange.

And it was worth the one-hour refrigeration wait because I ended making the most perfectly round pancakes ever. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't try refrigerating all my buttermilk pancake batter. I didn't do the yogurt topping, assuming my family's full of traditionalists, but they gave me the go-ahead to do it next time.

What a surprisingly fun breakfast.