Who Needs Carrot Cake, When You Can Have Carrot Cake Pancakes???

My husbands loves Carrot Cake.  He won't eat Chocolate Cake, Vanilla Cake, or any other type of cake (OK, maybe Ice Cream Cake), but he will eat Carrot Cake, all day, every day.  With his birthday falling in the middle of March, and with our focus on eating healthy and clean, regardless of what day it is (although I should enter here that we went out to eat and he ate a burger, which was his one request, and who could deny anyone that on their birthday?), I wanted to give him Carrot Cake sans refined wheat and nasty refined sugar.  And so, in my quest to find a recipe that I could modify to achieve this, I turned to my old faithful, Food Network. I urge everyone, once comfortable and knowledgeable enough to do so, to check out their favorite recipes, and modify them to a "cleaner" version.  I should mention that Bobby Flay is my Chef crush.  I have several crushes, depending on fitness and food, as you'll learn through this blog over time, however, this special ginger is one of my FN favs, and when I found this recipe, I had to start here:

Carrot Pancakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

How, you ask, does one start to "clean up" a recipe?  Well, first off, I automatically took out the AP Flour.  Although it's lighter, and fluffier, it is so because all it's natural, good for you qualities have been removed.  Will the texture change?  Yup.  You'll get over it, believe me.  I substituted Whole Wheat Organic Flour there.  I also replaced the granulated sugar with Stevia.  It's a sweetener you learn to work with over time, and I say this because it tends to be much sweeter than regular refined sugar, but it's not unmanageable.  

Lastly, the Cream Cheese Frosting.  How is it possible to make this taste delicious and make it healthy?  Well, sometimes, you have to realize, that although Fat Free products aren't the best option, gosh darn it, you need freaking Cream Cheese to make Cream Cheese Frosting!  So I used Fat Free Cream Cheese in place of regular, substituted Stevia again for sugar, and used soy milk for regular milk.  Voila, a healthier cream cheese frosting!  

I might add, that these may have possibly been the best pancakes that I have ever made.  I'm just throwing that out there!