Chocolate Cake Experiments - Can You Make a Pancake?

Yesterday I started this series where I answer some cake questions that I have.  Today I'm continuing with a questions I've had for a really long time, but I've never had the means to answer.  Today I'm going to find out if you can make pancakes out of cake batter.  The reason I've never had the means to try this before is because whenever I've had cake batter in the past, I'm pretty focused on making cakes.  I generally find it in bad taste to waste cake batter, except today, in the name of science.

I figure that the word pan "cake" implies to me that at one time people decided to make cakes, in their pans.  It seems logical enough, but does it work?

The moment I poured the batter into my hot pan I knew that this wasn't going to work.  In fact, the minute my batter was made I was pretty sure that this wasn't going to work.  The batter is just too runny to make a fluffy pancake.  Pancakes, when being fried, have to be fluffy before you put them into the pan.  Cakes, because they take a lot longer to cook, can gain their fluffiness in the oven.  So the leavening agent in cakes works slower than the leavening agent in pancakes.  The minute my batter hit the pan I put my syrup away because I knew I wasn't having pancakes for lunch today.

While I didn't end up with a traditional  looking pancake, what I got wasn't that bad. It was still kind of fluffy, under a harder crunchy crust.  It seemed like the crust came from the large amount of sugar in the batter.  I'm guessing that pancakes don't use as much sugar as regular cakes.  The chocolate flavour was still there, but I had to be careful not to burn it because that would have ruined the taste completely. I had to keep a watchful eye on the pan, and it only took a few minutes to cook.

The pan cake doesn't look very appetizing, but it tasted fine. The dry texture of the pan cake could have been improved with a topping, like icing or maple syrup, but that probably wouldn't have worked flavour wise because the cake was too sweet on its own.  I don't think I'd ever try this again, but I'm glad I could finally answer that question that was stuck in my head.

CC