Pumpkin Spice Pancakes Recipe

If you love all things pumpkin spice, then you are going to love this pumpkin spice pancakes recipe! Made with fall’s star ingredient and the warm blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves, these tender and fluffy pancakes are the perfect seasonal breakfast item to make this weekend!

Pumpkin Spice Pancakes

I originally created this pumpkin spice pancakes recipe back in 2014. I remember that pumpkin spice everything was all the trend at the time. 

While the famous pumpkin spice latte, affectionately referred to as the PSL, had been around for at least a decade by that point, the flavor’s popularity hadn’t spread like wildfire until 2010 and beyond. 

Nowadays, you can find pumpkin spice in almost everything when September rolls around. Did you know they even make pumpkin spice goldfish crackers? Yeah, and they’re actually tasty!

I figured this recipe needed a refresher, with some new photos and an update on the actual recipe ingredients, as I’ve tweaked it a bit since I originally posted it. 

How can I spice up my pancake mix?

These pumpkin spice pancakes utilize canned pumpkin purée and pumpkin pie spice seasoning to give it their seasonal twist, compared to classic butter pancakes. 

That said, if you are trying to doctor up a mix and make pumpkin spice pancakes with Bisquick, I’ve seen people do that by simply replacing the flour in the recipe with Bisquick and skipping the baking powder and salt. 

That’s because Bisquick is more of a general baking mix and would still need some of the added sugar from this recipe.

If you’re making pumpkin spice pancakes with pancake mix, like the kind they sell at Williams-Sonoma that’s specifically made for pancakes, then you can probably skip the added sugar in this recipe as those typically contain sugar in them already. 

I hardly buy store-bought mixes because I honestly don’t make pancakes at home that often. They’re a special treat in my house, so I figure that when I do make them, I’ll do them from scratch.

Plus, pancakes are not hard to make at all; it’s a one-bowl kind of recipe, and if you’ve got the pumpkin and fall spices on hand, you can definitely whip this up in a jiffy!

 

Why are restaurant pancakes so fluffy?

While a good recipe is always necessary to create fluffy pancakes, I think the real secret lies in how you mix your batter and how you cook it. 

Assuming you’ve got a great pancake recipe (your batter should be nice and thick), then you want to have a really gentle handle when you’re actually mixing in the dry ingredients. 

More often that not, in an effort to mix out lumps, people over-whisk their pancake batter to get it super smooth. While you do want to mix out large clumps, small clumps in pancake batter are completely fine and favored over over-mixing the batter. 

This technique is true about most baked goods, including muffins and cakes. The more you mix, the more likely you are to end up with a dense baked good. 

It’s also important that when you cook the pancakes, you don’t fidget around with them or press down on them with your spatula. Sometimes people do this in their impatience to get the pancakes to cook faster, and it’ll cause your pancakes to lose those nice little air bubbles that form inside them and become too flat. 

 Tips for Making Pumpkin Spice Pancakes

Summarizing some of the tips shared above and sharing a few ingredient swaps below, here are my suggestions when making these delicious holiday pancakes:

• Don’t over-mix your batter. Little clumps in your batter are fine. 
• If you don’t have pumpkin pie spice on hand, you can use 1 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/4 tsp ground ginger, 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg, and 1/8 tsp ground cloves. 
• You can either use 2 tbsp vegetable oil or 2 tbsp melted butter. Your choice. 
• Make sure you’re using pumpkin purée and not pumpkin pie filling. 
• Use a 1/2 cup measuring tool to measure out your batter; makes it so much easier to get evenly sized pancakes. 
• Keep your flame on medium-low and don’t move around the pancake or press down on it with your spatula. You should only be using the spatula to flip the pancake once, and then remove from the pan. 
• Use a sharp-edged spatula to help you flip the pancakes more easily.