Pancakes are a weekly occurrence at my house, but I occasionally find myself without key pancake ingredients like eggs and butter. Much to my own delight, I discovered that those ingredients weren't required to make a delicious pancake from scratch. What's more, the resulting pancakes were light, fluffy, low on ingredients, and vegan.

If you're looking for a pancake that is incredibly easy, but also delivers on lightness and fluff, this is pancake recipe that you'll want to memorize.

A Basic Pancake Without Eggs

Discovering this incredibly simple vegan pancake happened by accident. I'd been making a variation on these pancakes with almond milk and eggs for years, usually when I needed a quick batch of pancakes on a weekday. There's no separating the eggs or whipping the egg whites, so these pancakes were as basic as they come with just flour, leavening, a little sugar, milk, and eggs.

Until one harried morning when I promised my 3-year-old pancakes and we were out of eggs. So I took my basic pancake recipe and simply left out the eggs. The results were pretty delicious, if not a little flat. Increasing the baking powder a tad and adding a little more moisture in the form of maple syrup easily remedied its shortcoming in the next batch.

Cooking Vegan Pancakes

Once you've got the batter mixed up, it's time to preheat a pan and add a little fat for frying. I love coconut oil for frying these vegan pancakes. It does a better job mimicking butter in the pan and lends its sweetness to the finished pancakes. These pancakes can still easily be fried in a little vegetable oil instead and still turn out incredibly delicious.

Key Steps for Better Vegan Pancakes

• Check your baking powder. Because this recipe is getting all of its lift from the baking powder, make sure yours is fresh. Check the expiration date and if you're still not sure, try testing it with this method.
• Rest the batter. This is my favorite piece of pancake advice: Always rest your batter before cooking it. Not only does this give the flour time to absorb the almond milk and break up any lumps, but it also gives the baking powder time to go to work making tiny bubbles that will lift the pancakes.
• Keep the pancakes warm. These pancakes do deflate a little bit when they cool, as do most pancakes, but keeping them warm keeps them fluffy and ready for syrup, making them even more irresistible.