To Celebrate the New Year: Chocolate Pancakes with Raspberries and Bacon

I have a personal policy to not order restaurant menu items that I could conceivably make at home.  Make well, at home, I mean.  For instance, I make a really tasty lasagna, and a very tasty eggplant parmasan, and I can even make buttery garlic bread sticks with a golden crispy outside and a soft warm inside.  So, I usually avoid Italian restaurants and opt for places that serve entrees I don't make so well at home - like murgh tikka massala. (Oh, how I love Indian food.........  mmmm........ Indian food.........)

Ahem.  Sorry. 

Last weekend, I had the most delightful morning out with some of my family members in from out of town.  My mom treated all the ladies to brunch at a very trendy place where the menu was a tough one - so many delectable-sounding things to choose from and only stomach room enough for one.  I ultimately chose the rice bowl with Korean spare ribs and pickled vegetables (oh. my. goodness. it. was. unbelievably. delicious.) and a spiiiiiicy bloody Mary.  I forewent the chocolate pancakes with raspberries and bacon thinking - rice and vegetable are healthier for me and I think I could make that chocolatey-raspberry-bacony goodness at home.

So to celebrate the New Year, I did.  

I served it for dinner.

My family really loved me.

I used this pancake recipe from My Thirty Spot.   I tripled it to feed my large and hungry family.  I did not make the marshmallow topping, just the pancakes.  They were very cocoa-y, and were not too sweet.  They were juuuuuust right.

So pretty to see fresh fruit in the winter :)

I baked the bacon in the oven, of course.  Because since I learned about that little trick back in October, that's now the only acceptable way to cook bacon.  All those years, I never cooked real bacon because of the greasy mess, and could honestly say I wasn't really a bacon-eater.  Now, in the past three months, I've eaten more bacon than in all the rest of my life combined.  

Because I was trying to copy the menu offering as best as possible, I decide to make my own chocolate sauce for the first time ever.   It was easier than I expected and tasted so amazing, no husband of mine will ever be allowed to bring a squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup into this house again.  

This is the recipe I used -- I doubled it, but probably didn't need too.  We still have some left over in the fridge, which is kind of a dangerous situation.  

(No pics of the actual cooking process because I was non-stop stirring bubbling, steaming chocolate.  Make your own and you'll see what it looks like.)

I don't recall there being chocolate shavings on the restaurant pancakes, but it seemed like the right thing to do since I had a dark chocolate bar in my pantry and because... chocolate shavings.

The only sad side to this story is that I really wanted to make my own whipped cream so that the homemade effort would be complete.  But I didn't have any whipping cream and I did have a tub of whipped topping, so I went with the obvious and easy option.  Some nights, you just can't do it all.  Know what??  It still tasted awesome.

If you are a person who likes chocolate, raspberries, and bacon (which you probably are, since that describes 99.98% of the world's population), I think you should try it.

Happy New Year!