A Mother's Day (or Any Day) Breakfast

     This year, I was lucky to get out of school right before Mother's Day weekend, so I decided to go old school and make my mommy breakfast in bed. Now I know that pancakes are usually the go-to breakfast in bed food, but I've always had issues with plain old pancakes.  I don't quite know why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that I don't really like drenching them in syrup. Also, I don't get along with griddles. So I've found ways around these issues with this recipe--thick oven-baked pancakes with strawberry cream cheese topping.

INGREDIENTS:
Any type of pancake mix
1/4 cup sugar (2+2 tablespoons)
1/2 box of strawberries
2 bananas
1 8oz block of cream cheese

DIRECTIONS:
1. Grease two individual spring form pans and preheat the oven to 350.
2. For two baked pancakes, prepare the amount of mix specified for 8 regular pancakes.  The just-add-water kind works fine.  To that, add 2 Tablespoons of sugar.
3. Divide and pour the batter into two Individual sized spring form pans. Fill them a little more than halfway. (If you don't have individual pans, you could use a regular round 9 inch
cake pan, just bake it longer, and cut it into triangular slices.)

4. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

5. Slice the strawberries and bananas. (I used fresh strawberries that I had later frozen and defrosted in the microwave.  If you're using fresh strawberries, microwave the slices for 45 seconds to make them sweeter and mashable.)

6. For the topping: Make sure the cream cheese is very soft (room temperature).

7. In a small bowl, mash 2 tablespoons of sugar and half of the strawberries into the cream cheese until you get a consistent pink color. I just used a spoon, but if you want to get really fancy, you could used an electric mixer to get it super smooth. You will have extra.

8. Take the pancakes out of the oven and out of the pans. Plate them with a scoop of cream cheese on top and the rest of the fruit scattered about. Make it pretty!

     I also served this with cheesy scrambled eggs on the side. It's good to have something to cut the sweetness, but it turned out to be a lot of food. Bacon would be a great alternative. In the future, I won't post very many breakfast recipes, only because although it's the most important, breakfast usually isn't my favorite meal of the day.  It takes something really creative and different for me to get excited about breakfast, and I am excited about these pancakes!  Please enjoy and come back tomorrow for one of my favorite dinner recipes!