You ever have one of those mornings where you want some tasty breakfast food but you can’t decide what exactly you want to eat? We were having one of those mornings when we realized we had a box of the Trader Joe’s Maple Flavored Poffertjes (AKA Mini Pancake Puffs) in our freezer. Well, our breakfast decision suddenly became a no-brainer.
There are a couple options for cooking these. You can either go with the microwave, or you can cook them up in the oven. The oven method doesn’t really take all that long, and we wanted to avoid soggy pancake puffs, so we decided to toss these into our oven. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, scroll down to the bottom of this review.)
When we opened up the box, we realized there are quite a bit more pancake puffs here than we were expecting, but each one was smaller than we thought they’d be. We’d say that the circumference is slightly smaller than that of a ping pong ball, but these pancake puffs are flattened out rather than spherical. Because the package doesn’t recommend reheating these once you’ve cooked them, we decided to only cook up just under half the contents of our box, or 15 puffs (we estimate that there were about 32 puffs in our box, but we didn’t take the time to count them to confirm).
Now, the objectively correct way to eat these is with some syrup and a dusting of powdered sugar. However, for the sake of this review, we decided to give them a taste as is, before we did all that decoration.
And we have to say, even without any toppings, these are pretty dang tasty. They have a rich vanilla flavor to them, which makes them taste almost like Nilla Wafer cookies, though with a slightly “eggier” flavor. We absolutely love these, and we think they pair well with a super bitter cup of coffee.
The box suggests about 13 puffs as a serving size, claiming there should be about 2.5 servings in a box. If you stick with this amount, you’ll be consuming 420 calories and 390 mg of sodium. If you decide to chomp the whole box in a single sitting, you’re up to 1,150 calories and 1,060 mg of sodium. However, we don’t really thing you will do that. We suppose you could, hypothetically, but there is a pretty substantial amount of pancake puffs in this box. We had our 15 puffs with a couple strawberries and a cup of coffee, and that was the perfect-sized breakfast for us.
The Trader Joe’s Maple Flavored Poffertjes are far more flavorful than we were expecting. We ended up really enjoying this Dutch treat, and these pancake puffs really hit the spot on a warm summer morning.
If you want to learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these frozen pancake puffs, check out our package scans below.
