These coconut ricotta pancakes are light and fluffy and topped with a deliciously sweet butter made from caramelized bananas and vanilla creme fraiche.

My goal for this breakfast and these pictures was to depict a lazy weekend morning. The kind where you’re still in your pajamas, taking your time making pancakes alongside a BIG pot of coffee.

The kind where you sit at the table (or let’s be real, the couch) with that cup of coffee and the newspaper (or more likely, your phone/iPad) for an hour or two after and don’t feel bad about it one bit.

Here’s the reality of what went on behind the scenes:

I woke up about 3 hours later than I wanted to yesterday morning.

Ulysses worked a shift that ends at midnight all weekend, meaning he wasn’t getting home until almost 1am.

So, I was up (because it’s pointless to try and go to bed knowing you’re just going to be woken in an hour up by the sound of the garage door and your husband who is incapable of being “quiet” while trying to eat cereal at 1 in the morning) until he got home and my plans of getting out of bed by 8am to make us both breakfast before he had to go to work, already shot.

So, 11am.

I’m up, starting my work at these pancakes and Ulysses is getting ready to leave for work.

On his way out the door however, he looks at Ginger who is giving him the saddest eyes like “you’re leaving me AGAIN, human?!” and decided to give her a new stuffed animal hedgehog to make up for his departure.

Ginger has one toy…a hedgehog (she’s currently on something like her 20th). She suckles it like she’s 13 making out with a boy for the first time and she can do it for hours.

It’s all she wants in life. Really, youtube weimaraners and you’ll see what I mean, they all do this weird suckle thing and it’s freaky.

The problem however, is that Ginger ONLY suckles this thing when humans are in the same room as her and she feels “comfortable”.

It’s incredibly bizarre but I could be 5 feet away in the kitchen and that won’t be good enough for her. A human must be in the room, preferably both of us for prime suckling pleasure.

That was not the case yesterday.

Ulysses walks out the door the second he hands the thing to her and I’m in the kitchen finishing the pancakes and bringing them to the dining room to photograph. This leaves Ginger in an all out state of panic.

HUMANS? WHY ARE YOU NOT IN HERE SO I CAN MAKE OUT WITH MY HEDGEHOG??

She starts trotting around the house with the hedgehog in her mouth, whimpering the most pathetic sounds I’ve ever heard and she doesn’t stop for the entire next 30 minutes while I’m photographing, cleaning up and then finally (at noon) eating my breakfast.

So that whole lazy morning weekend breakfast thing?

Yeah, more like breakfast at noon by yourself while your psychotic whimpering Weimaraner prances around with a hedgehog shoved in her mouth. #thethingsyoudontseeinthepicture

What you do see is some amazingly fluffy coconut ricotta pancakes topped with what I can only describe as heaven in the guise of butter.

I looooove ricotta in pancakes (like these orange basil ricotta pancakes) and other baked goods like this ricotta almond fig cake, it just makes things so fluffy and moist.

I’ve had a container of creme fraiche on hand for the past week and got to thinking it would be mad good on some pancakes.

Then I got thinking some more and decided to blend it with caramelized bananas for this whipped “buttery” like topping that’s just out of this world. See that dollop on top of the pancakes in the picture?

Yeah, I ate about 5 times that amount in real life.

The lunatic canine made me do it.

These pancakes are also gluten-free. If you’re looking for more gluten-free pancake inspiration try these:

Banana nutmeg pancakes

Cinnamon raisin oat bran pancakes

Meyer lemon quinoa pancakes

And if you want a high-protein, super high satiety pancake – try this recipe for protein pancakes or pumpkin protein pancakes!