The Best Spices for Pancakes: Cinnamon, Vanilla, Pumpkin Pie Spice, Gingerbread and Chai

Pancake batter is mild, so it carries spice well. Cinnamon and vanilla are the easy picks, but the warm blends you already know from baking and tea work too: pumpkin pie spice, gingerbread spices, apple pie spice and chai. Two extension-service pumpkin pancake recipes use about 1¼ to 1½ teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice for a two-cup-of-flour batch. And if you want your pancakes to smell like chai, not pie, cardamom is the spice that does it.

At a glance

Pumpkin pie spice

Pumpkin pancakes are the best-documented spiced pancake around. Two SNAP-Ed recipes from university extension services both use pumpkin pie spice and canned pumpkin:

Neither recipe adds vanilla.

What’s in the blend depends on who made it. McCormick’s pumpkin pie spice lists cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and sulfiting agents. No cloves.⁹ Oregon State’s Food Hero recipe for the blend uses 2 tablespoons cinnamon and 1 tablespoon ginger to 1½ teaspoons each of nutmeg and cloves.¹⁰ US labels list ingredients in descending order by weight,¹¹ so McCormick’s blend is cinnamon first. Either way, it’s a cinnamon-led blend, not a clove-led one. See pumpkin pie spice substitutes.

Gingerbread spices

There’s no standard gingerbread spice blend. Williams-Sonoma’s gingerbread pancakes, adapted from its Essentials of Breakfast and Brunch, use 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, ¾ teaspoon ground ginger and ⅛ teaspoon ground cloves with 2 tablespoons of light molasses, for 1¼ cups of flour.¹ Allspice is a single berry that tastes like a mix of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, so it’s an easy way to add depth. Black pepper sometimes gets suggested for gingerbread blends, but none of these recipes uses it. See cooking with ginger, cooking with cloves and too much ginger.

Apple pie spice

Apple pie spice leads with cinnamon, but makers disagree on the rest. McCormick’s label lists cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice, and McCormick suggests it for French toast and oatmeal as well as pie.⁴ The Spice House’s version lists cinnamon, star anise, nutmeg, allspice, ginger and cloves.⁵ Fold some chopped apple into the batter and the pairing makes itself obvious. See apple pie spice substitutes.

Chai spices

Chai spice comes from masala chai, spiced milk tea. Three named recipes compared on our chai spices page (Saveur, Dishoom and the Culinary Institute of America) all use green cardamom, cinnamon, ginger and cloves, and two add black pepper.⁶⁷⁸ The CIA notes that chai masala mixes may include cardamom, cinnamon, ginger and peppercorns.⁸ Cardamom is what makes it smell like chai and not like pie, and none of the pie blends above includes it. Stir ground cardamom and a little cinnamon and ginger into the dry ingredients and you’ve got a chai pancake, no tea needed. See cardamom and too much cardamom.

Cinnamon and vanilla on their own

Cinnamon. The cinnamon most often sold in North America is cassia, according to NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.¹² Cassia contains coumarin. Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment calculates that a 60 kg adult hits the tolerable daily intake at about 2 g of cassia with average coumarin content a day.¹³ As we read it, the occasional batch of pancakes isn’t what the BfR is warning about. Regular heavy use of cassia is. Whisk cinnamon into the dry ingredients, where it spreads more evenly than in the wet. See Ceylon vs. cassia cinnamon and cinnamon substitutes.

Vanilla. Williams-Sonoma puts its vanilla in the syrup, not the batter: ½ teaspoon with maple syrup and orange flower water.¹ In the US, vanilla extract has to contain at least 35% ethyl alcohol by volume. With less, it’s sold as vanilla flavoring.¹⁴ See vanilla extract substitutes and too much vanilla.

Related

• French toast spices
• Oatmeal spices
• Spices for scrambled eggs
• Too much nutmeg
• The master list of herbs and spices