Sweet Potato Pancakes

I attempted to order these on a menu in Chicago and when they came back to tell me they were out, I was disappointed. But alas, why be upset when I can recreate them myself?! Half the recipes I found online were shortcut recipes, as I like to call them - used bisquik or some sort of pre-made mix, sweet potato butter instead of actual sweet potato.

*I'll give you fair warning, this recipe makes a lot of pancakes. I may be eating sweet potato pancakes  all week for breakfast actually.  It would be a                                                                      difficult recipe to cut in half though because you use just one potato.

Sweet Potato Pancakes
1 medium sweet potato, peeled, cubed and boiled - then mashed
*Mine was about 2 cups chopped largely
1 1/2 cups wheat flour
1/2 cup ground oatmeal (in a food processor)
1 TB flaxseed
4 tsp baking powder
2 TB brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
pinch of nutmeg
1 1/2 cups milk
4 tsp melted butter
1 whole egg and 2 egg whites

1. Peel, cube and boil the sweet potatoes until fork tender. Drain and let sit until the food processor is ready.
2. In large mixing bowl, add your dry ingredients. Before adding your oatmeal, take out your food processor and grind up the oatmeal and the flaxseed together. Add that to the other dry ingredients - the flour, baking powder, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. Whisk together.

3. Back in the food processor, puree the boiled sweet potato together with the melted butter. The addition of the butter will help it to get the sort of silky smooth texture we're looking for!
4. In a small mixing bowl, beat your eggs together. Then add the sweet potato mixture to it and mix together with a fork. It will still be a pretty thick liquid at this point - with the back of your fork press out any un-pureed sweet potato chunks so there aren't chunks in the pancakes.
5. Then add your milk - mix well so that all of the ingredients are completely incorporated together.

6. Add the liquids to the dry ingredients bowl and whisk together just until all of the dry ingredients are all wet. At this point you can decide if you need more milk, based on whether you like big fluffier pancakes or lighter, thinner pancakes. Personally, I like the thick ones, so I added maybe a couple TB more of milk just to be safe, but you could add up to another 1/2 cup of milk for the thinner pancake versions.

7. In a large, nonstick pan, heat over medium and once hot spray with nonstick spray and start making your pancakes! You can make them however large or small you'd like - just when the top starts to bubble, that's when you know it's time to flip them over. Well, correction - that's how you usually know when to flip pancakes over. With these, if you have them thick, they're so thick that you don't really see the bubbles. After 4-5 minutes I'd say you're safe to flip over.

These turned out to not be very sweet, so the syrup was a nice addition on top. They were seriously the most fluffy, soft pancakes I've ever had - just totally delicious.

Hint for those with lots of leftovers: Don't try to save the batter. I tried and they lost a lot of their fluffiness and ended up heavy and rather dense, not how good pancakes should be! Instead, make them all and put your extras in the freezer, then pop them in the toaster when you want to eat them!