Heart Healthy.
Or not so much. It’s ironic that—thanks to sugary sweets, fancy dinners, and rich desserts—a day devoted to matters of the heart can be so dangerous for your heart. Google “red velvet” and your results will be saturated with butter, eggs, heavy cream, and enough sugar to sweeten even the Grinch. Pretty, for sure. But healthy, it is not.
Until now.
Flipping through People Magazine last Friday, I stumbled across a recipe for “Jessica Alba’s favorite red velvet pancakes.” Red velvet pancakes?! I had to create a heart-healthy version.
Mission accomplished. These are like eating cake for breakfast!
Red Velvet Pancakes for One
- 2T flour (I used 20g whole-wheat pastry)
- 2T plus 1tsp oat bran (20g) (you can sub flour)
- red food coloring (For alternatives, see: Natural Food Coloring Ideas.)
- 1/2 tsp plus 1/8 tsp baking powder
- scant 1/8 tsp salt
- 2T cocoa powder (I use regular, but if you want a more brownie-like taste, try dutch cocoa)
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/3 cup plus 1T nondairy milk (95g, or more, if needed)
- optional: If you don’t like the taste of fat-free pancakes, be sure to add 1 tablespoon oil
- 1-2 T sugar, or 1 stevia packet (I left it out. If using liquid sweetener, decrease milk accordingly.)
Mix dry ingredients. Add wet and mix. Then make your pancakes! (Makes 5-6)
Nutrition Information:
(For the entire batch)
- Calories: 230 (130 if omitting oil)
- Fat: 14g (or less than 1g if omitting oil)
- Protein: 3g
- Fiber: 5g
I topped these with my Healthy Cream Cheese Icing.
Then, really fancy things happened. I dusted the pancakes with cocoa powder and swirled some of the chocolatey fairy dust into the frosting.
If you’re still hungry for pancakes (although I don’t know how that’d be possible, after these!), I have an entire recipe tab devoted to them:
Question of the Day:
What do you do to be Heart Healthy?
Get regular exercise? Eat healthy foods? Spend quality time with people who make you happy? The heart is an amazing little organ; be sure to treat it right!
These look amazing….I’m going to make them for my kids dinner tonight!
Sounds delisssssh! I don’t have any sort of food coloring around, so if I made these, I’d omit the food coloring and just call them double- chocolate pancakes. I bet they’d be even more
delicious smeared with nut butter and chocolate chips!
I would’ve done just that, if I wasn’t making them specifically for Valentine’s Day. Next time, I’ll omit the color, since it doesn’t really do anything for the pancakes, taste-wise.
Oh my, these look delicioso, Katie! Obviously, I already had breakfast today. Do you think I can wait until tomorrow… Hmmm, might have to eat these for dinner!
“Fi fi fo fum, I wish these pancakes were in my tum!!”
Holy moly these are awesome!! Heart healthy cake pancakes..perfect!
You and your extremely low calorie foods. It’s getting old already. 130 calories does not constitute as a meal, especially when you’re as thin as you are, and exercise like you do. You’re always denying that you have an issue with food, but I’d beg to differ..
Normally I wouldn’t bother to respond to this, but I do need to point out that you’re making assumptions here. You have no idea if that’s all I ate for breakfast, or what my other meals of the day were. In fact, you don’t even know if I made those pancakes for me or for someone else. If something on my blog is “getting old” to you, please feel free to stop reading.
A 130 calorie meal, regardless of who’s eating it, is not representative of a meal. And although the person eating it may very well have supplemented the pancakes with something else, it still most likely wouldn’t be enough to make for an entire meal. You talk so much about “healthy eating,” and what people have yet to realize is that under eating, or taking in extremely few calories is just as detrimental, if not more so, than overeating. I just feel as though your philosophies are constantly contradicting themselves, and you are not sending a positive message to your blog readers. I’m not trying to taunt you in any way, just stating my feelings based on observing you posting a conglomerate of “low calorie,” “fat free,” “sugar free” recipes. It’s concerning.
Hi Katie,
I wanted to tell you I think you’re so fantastic. I know I’ve emailed you about this before, but I wanted to say it here. I also wanted to say that I am in recovery from an eating disorder, so it’s obvious to me that Jen has one too. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be so “concerned” with what someone else was eating. It’s a characteristic of an eating disorder, so please don’t take her unwarranted comments to heart.
Jen, if you have a problem with Katie’s blog, stop reading! When I was in the throes of my ed, I had to stop reading blogs altogether because they were so triggering to me. But please don’t harass innocent people. Besides, if you really paid attention to Katie’s blog, you’d know she doesn’t undereat by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t know anyone who’d call a 3000-a-day diet undereating. Maybe a bodybuilder?
Katie’s blog, and her philosophy, has been an ENORMOUS help in my recovery. More so than ANY other blog. So thank you, Katie.
>:(
She added cream cheese icing AND tons of cocoa nibs! I DO have food issues and therefore I know how much those added to the calorie count. Yes, undereating is bad. I’m in therapy myself to deal with it and the emotional issues that are causing my food issues. Katie, however, doesn’t strike me as having any of the rubbish nonsense food crap that I do. She’s what I WISH I could be like around food. She eats when hungry, eats what she likes to eat, doesn’t seem to fear calories, doesn’t fear healthy fats or carbs, doesn’t avoid goodies/desserts and is active and seems to love her body for what it can do, rather than how it looks.
I hope, one day, that I’m as level as she is (and I hope that it happens before I run out of $ for therapy!)
I know it’s easy to project. I’m guilty of it myself – when food/eating is such a scary thing it’s easy to try to normalize your own bad brain stuff by assuming everyone is thinking/feeling/acting like you are. I was SURE my bestie was having similar food issues as me, I was sure she wasn’t eating enough and was exercising too much. I even accused her of it. And she smacked me down good and hard. I was projecting my own issues on to her. She’s actually 1000% more normal about food than I am but I just assumed that since we share some behaviors/opinions she must have the same sort of subclinical ED stuff I’m dealing with. She doesn’t. Neither does Katie.
Katie, thanks for your blog. This stuff is ridiculously hard and I find that the more I’m around people who are normal about food, the harder it is to stay in my bad brain space and the less scary food becomes.
a bit late but i added the ingredients individually using the brands i get at the supermarket and the recipe comes out to 250 calories. adding the cream cheese + choc chippies this does equate a meal.
Just to say I’ve never commented before but I love your recipes and have tried a few of them with great success (well… I discovered that peanuts don’t necessarily sub well for coconut, lol). Although as an occasional calorie counter, I have to say – those counts can’t be accurate, can they? Unless you’re using very different ingredients to the ones I’m used to. The wheat flour (about 75 cals for 20g) and oat bran (about 50-75 cals for 20g) alone would be 130, and that’s before counting the milk, cocoa or vanilla extract. I mean, I’d love to be wrong, but are you sure as to the counts? (I understand that you’re only doing it as a service anyway – personally, I always work them out myself anyway, just so I know what I’m doing *g*)
Hey mmmm,
I actually went by cups for this, not grams. My flour says it’s 100c for 1/4 cup, so 50 for 2T. And oats are 150 for 1/2 cup, so 35ish for 2T, plus I added 10 for the extra tsp. 10 for the cocoa, and then I added some for the milk and extracts.
Did I do something wrong? I will admit, I’m not exactly experienced with this lol. But I do want to be accurate, so I don’t mess up the people who want to use the numbers.
Oh, I see your reasoning (and I am sorry if you feel like you’re being picked on today, if you know what I mean!). My calculations were – using the net, that ‘infallible’ resource:
1 cup (US) wholewheat flour = 120g, therefore 20g = 1/6 cup = 67 cals
1 cup oat bran = 94g (love the accuracy), therefore 20g = 1/5 cup = 60 cals
2 Tablespoons cocoa (unsweetened) = 15g = 25 cals (yours might be much lower, or it might have been teaspoons instead of tablespoons?)
95ml Almond Breeze = 25 cals
baking powder + vanilla extract = 10 cals roughly
giving a total of roughly 180 cals per serving by my estimate. I guess really it just reflects the difference between weight and volume measurements, which I hadn’t considered since I always weigh. And I do feel bad about doing this now, since I know my first response would probably be “fine, I’m never giving calorie counts again!” but I thought since I’d opened the can of worms to begin with I’d go through with it. But at least I see how you got your counts now, so thanks for your very gracious reply! I still think your recipes are fabulous and I hope you don’t give up helping people out on nutritional data because of one picky commenter 🙂
Oh my gosh, I was TOTALLY fine with your comment! In fact, I really love when people help me out in areas where I’m admittedly not so strong. That’s how I learn! I have always marveled at the fact that gram measurements are not synonymous with cup measurements (such as with oats– how are they allowed to say that 40g is a 1/2 cup?!). But until your comment, I never even thought to carry that idiosyncrasy over to calories. If I’m going to bother listing the counts anyway, I’d be embarrassed to have them listed wrong, so please do always check for me and let me know if I make a mistake! It does tend to happen… every once in a while lol ;).
Those are some impressively low calorie pancakes!
Katie these look wonderful! Vegan pancakes can be tricky to get right and you clearly got these right!
And the cream cheese icing is where it’s at for me. 🙂
Heart healthy…I eat mostly plants, I exercise and stay active, I do yoga 🙂
Haha yeah, skip the pancakes and go straight for the frosting. I like your thinkin :).
Yum! I love doing kundalini yoga. Not that I ever had high blood pressure, but since I’ve started practicing kundalini yoga, my blood pressure has been lower than normal.
I’m with you. Yoga grounds me and is the best stress relief I’ve ever found!