Chocolate Zucchini Sheet Pan Pancakes: Simple Delicious Family Breakfast

These delicious chocolate zucchini sheet pan pancakes (are they breakfast or dessert?!) are squares of fluffy goodness! They are a great way to include whole grains, nuts, and vegetables in your breakfast rotation. Whole wheat flour, walnuts, and flax seed provide a filling, fiber-rich base. Eggs and milk give you plenty of protein to also help keep blood sugars balanced. Throwing in some grated zucchini slides a vegetable serving into a traditionally quite-starchy breakfast option! The addition of chocolate chips obviously increases the antioxidant benefits AND makes this meal feel like a treat.

Serve with butter and maple syrup… or vanilla yogurt and fresh fruit… or your leftover blueberry cream cheese frosting from your four-year-old’s birthday cake, and you’ve got yourself a family-friendly, healthy, hot breakfast! As a bonus, the leftovers, once cooled, make a great on-the-go snack to take to the park!

Chocolate Zucchini Sheet Pan Pancakes: Using Up Produce Abundance!

I hate throwing away food that has spoiled, but sometimes, particularly if you try to shop and eat seasonally, you end up with a lot of something on hand! One day recently, in early autumn, I had an abundance of zucchini that we’d been given. And they were on the verge of going bad. I’d gone to bed the night before after washing the zucchini in vinegar water (I go into detail about why I pre-wash my produce in my blog post about how to minimize time in the kitchen as a mom) and leaving them to dry overnight.

I woke up thinking about this delicious (read: rich, sweet, oily and fluffy) chocolate zucchini bread that my childhood pastor’s wife used to make. It was really more like chocolate cake with some zucchini and chocolate chips added! But we called it “bread” since it was made in a bread loaf. I briefly thought about trying to make the “bread” for dessert… But then I realized I was going to have a busy day and with my currently about-to-pop-with-baby-#4 low energy levels, adding something else to my to-do list didn’t sound like a great idea.

So I decided to see if I could make something for breakfast with chocolate and zucchini as sheet pan pancakes instead!

Adapting a Zucchini Pancake Recipe:

We are big fans of sheet pan pancakes around here. I try to prioritize eating breakfast and dinner together as a family. But since I despise standing over a griddle to make enough pancakes for my breakfast-loving kids, I always dreaded when they ask for pancakes. I also love having leftovers to pull out the next day, and I don’t like inefficient food storage in the fridge AT ALL. Since sheetpan pancakes can be easily doubled or tripled, and you can cut them into squares or rectangles which all stack neatly inside a container maximizing the fridge space, well… like I said: we’re big fans of sheet pan pancakes!

The basic idea for sheet pan pancakes is that you make up your pancake batter, and then rather than cooking them in individual portions, you pour the batter into a sheet pan and bake it in the oven for 20-ish minutes.

Viola! Breakfast is served with about 10 minutes of prep/mixing time, 20-30 minutes of hands-off time (a great opportunity to wash the dirty dishes and set the table – maybe even make a cup of coffee or get yourself or a kid or two dressed or cycle through the laundry and make your bed!), and then you’re sitting down as a family to eat a hot meal.

So, since it had been a few days since our last round of sheet pan pancakes, I thought I’d search for a chocolate zucchini sheet pan pancake recipe. I didn’t see anything in my allotted 30 seconds of searching, so I decided to adapt and tweak this recipe for Whole Wheat Zucchini Pancakes, and see how it would turn out. I was really pleased with the result, and my family was also, judging by the consumption rate!

What You Need for Chocolate Zucchini Sheet Pan Pancakes:

• whole wheat flour (you could also use all purpose flour or a combination. I just wanted to make these extra filling!)
• milk – I had dairy milk, and I added a bit of lemon juice to make it more “buttermilk” like in flavor. Obviously, you could totally substitute a plant based milk!
• eggs (or you could use flax seed eggs)
• leavening (baking soda and baking powder)
• sweeteners/spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, and sugar (if you want)
• Texture-adders/healthy oil additions: ground flax seed and chopped walnuts
• oil – I used olive oil because I didn’t want to have to melt butter! But the original recipe calls for butter, and I’m pretty sure coconut oil would also work totally fine
• zucchini – or you could try an equivalent amount of grated carrots or get even more creative with your vegetable! I’m all about getting those veggies into the kiddos!
• chocolate chips – not the healthiest option, but we had a bunch of extra chocolate chips someone had given us, so I thought I’d throw them in

The Family’s Reaction and Variations for Consuming:

Since my husband and kids are my testers, I served these up and waited to hear what they thought of it. It came got some pretty great reviews! My husband liked that it felt really filling – the flax seeds, whole wheat flour, and walnuts made it feel heartier than some of the sheet pan pancakes in my normal rotation.

The kids absolutely loved the chocolate chips in pancakes for breakfast – I don’t usually do that! We served it up with leftover blueberry cream cheese frosting from my recently-turned-4-year-old’s birthday cake, and that was pretty amazing!

I had doubled the batch, since I had plenty of zucchini, so we ended up having a good amount of leftovers. They toasted up really well in our toaster and were delicious with butter and maple syrup.

We also had them as mid-morning snacks and mid-afternoon snacks on a couple different days, just cold and without any toppings. Honestly, that was probably one of my favorite ways! Ooey-gooey chocolate chips in baked goods are delicious, but I really love cold chocolate chips (how they crunch a little bit!). So they were like a muffin but in a square slice form with crunchy chocolate chips… It was delicious!

Recipe Variations + Ingredient Swaps:

Since these chocolate zucchini sheet pan pancakes were such a hit, I played around a little bit with some variations for the actual recipe over the next few days (we ate a LOT of chocolate zucchini sheet pan pancakes last week!):

They were pretty easy to convert to dairy free by using homemade almond milk – I just blended 1/3 cup almonds with a cup of water in my nutribullet blender which is one of my favorite kitchen appliances!), and then added a second cup of water for a quick pulse.

I also wanted to make them without chocolate chips in case we were ever out (because I don’t always have chocolate chips on hand). So I adapted the recipe by adding cocoa powder, additional sugar, and additional oil. That worked pretty well – it gave a nice, dark-chocolate flavor. However, since it didn’t have the little pockets of gooey chocolate-y goodness, it wasn’t QUITE as big of a hit with the kids. But it did fit the bill for something chocolate-y and cake-y for breakfast!

And lastly, I also adapted this with greek yogurt rather than milk for a higher-protein count per serving. I omitted the lemon juice in that version as well. Since greek yogurt is rather thick, I added some water to help get the right “batter” texture, but that also worked well and gave it a bit more of a “tang” than the milk+lemon juice version.

Conclusion: Super Family Friendly Breakfast

Overall, these are definitely going to become a breakfast rotation. I still have one more HUGE zucchini sitting in the bottom of my fridge, and I’m planning to grate it up and freeze it in 1-cup snack bags. It’ll be easy to grab the amount of frozen zucchini I need the night before, and it’ll be thawed by morning to throw into pancakes.

I love that this gets a vegetable into a delicious, kid-approved breakfast. And I also love that it is so filling and hearty feeling with a decent amount of protein per serving, since it kept the kids full throughout the morning. Also, I love that it’s pretty quick to whip together, bakes pretty fast with a little bit of hands-off time for me so I can whip through another morning chore or two, and then it provides a hot, satisfying breakfast for my whole family to sit down to together.