Pancake Mix Fail

I received a package of Dove's Red Velvet Pancake Mix and decided to make up the whole bag one early morning to freeze in single-portion baggies for breakfasts at work.  Pancakes always take longer than it feels like they should, so I thought I'd just spend an hour on it and get it over with.

This is not a good mix, and I regret wasting 4 eggs on it.  The pancakes taste good, but the batter is very hard to work with.  There isn't enough baking powder in the packaged mix and I suspect they use too much butter, so the pancakes spread out far more than they should.  They won't set unless you turn up the heat higher than is recommended.  By the time the pancakes are firm enough to flip, the underside is burned.  They still taste fine, but appearance fuels the appetite as much as actual hunger.  A child would not eat a pancake that looks burned or squashed, and neither would most adults.  And if you try to flip them when they are properly golden, they mash up and/or fall apart.

I got the impression that someone modified a cupcake recipe and packaged it as pancake mix.  With an extra tablespoon of baking powder and 1/4 C more milk, this batter would be perfect for cakes or cupcakes.

So why am I reviewing a mix?  Mainly because I'm surprised that it failed.  Mixes are generally trustworthy, as that gets you to buy them again.  If a cookbook has a bad recipe in it, you've already bought the book and maybe just won't buy the author's next one.  A mix that makes a good product could get you to spend money on that company for years.

I couldn't find a scathing review of the mix, but there was a suspicious number of recipes turning the batter into something other than pancakes.  All of the photos showed pancakes much smaller than the directions and they were as flat as mine.  Yet no one was willing to say that the mix is a flop.  Maybe it's because, despite the technical difficulties, they do taste good.