Happy Tuesday! I hope you had Monday off and a nice long weekend to enjoy. If not, so sorry.

After spending my real weekend on blog and podcast things it was nice to steal a little time back from the regular work week. My day started of well, optimistic and full of carbs, with plans only to lazily build a tiny cake and make my way through my DVR. However, between the smoke in the air from the Napa fires and a 5 pm earthquake, it did start to feel a little apocalyptic by the end (that could just be all the Buffy I've been watching*). But before all of the world-ending portents I had leftovers of these pancakes for breakfast, these wonderful, chocolate and mascarpone-filled beauties that I really had to force myself to stop eating. 

That's the problem with cooking sometimes, the way you can disguise ingredients. I would never eat half a container of mascarpone in one sitting, but that's exactly the amount of mascarpone I ate for breakfast yesterday, because it was shoved into a jacket of eggs and flour and butter and dotted with mini chocolate morsels.

Hi, this is why I do cardio.

But really, these fragile, soft-centered pancakes are that good. They are like your favorite chocolate-chip pancakes from childhood, but with tangy mascarpone that leaves the centers a bit soft and creamy and combines with the chocolate into a flavor profile not unlike my favorite treats from Mike's Pastry. It's not exactly a cannoli, but if you can't get to Boston, they are pretty darn close.

*Or maybe the gut-wrenching news of all the communities and vineyards absolutely decimated just across the Bay. Or the Las Vegas shooting. Or Puerto Rico. Or Texas. Or North Korea. Honestly the news feels so generally apocalyptic these days that sometimes it seems like the only thing to do is make Buffy jokes and keep cooking, if only to keep the soul-crushingness of it all at bay.

Cannoli Pancakes

• 8 oz mascarpone
• 2 eggs
• splash of vanilla
• dash of cinnamon
• 1 tbs sugar
• 3 tbs flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• good pinch salt
• 3/8 cup mini chocolate chips

1. Whisk mascarpone, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon and sugar together. Add in flour, baking powder and salt and whisk to combine. Fold in chocolate chips.
2. Heat a griddle over medium heat and melt a little butter on the hot surface. Pour batter by 1/4 cups onto hot griddle. Cook until bubbles appear on the surface then gently flip and cook other side 2-3 minutes more (pancakes are very delicate). 
3. Serve hot, with a dustin of powdered sugar if you like, though these are so loaded with chocolate you probably won't need syrup.