For any americans here: With the right recipe, are your pancakes edible without simply using them as sponges for high fructose corn syrup? I'm thinking of the ones with baking powder, that I consider "american pancakes" (but correct me if that's not right).
America's Test Kitchen had a recipe for blueberry pancakes a number of years ago that I thought was pretty good. You can omit the blueberries of course if you want.
If you're an adult, you don't eat pancakes all the time (you probably shouldn't), you don't pour a sea of syrup onto your pancakes, and you aren't watching every penny, you owe it to yourself to buy real maple syrup. Real butter, too, for that matter.
That said, the corn syrup used as a base for cheap pancake syrup is regular corn syrup, not high fructose, though they are frequently today, not always, sweetened with HFCS. The brand I liked as a kid, Log cabin, has no HFCS. I just looked it up. Back in the wayback machine, old-timers would eat pancakes with Karo syrup, which is plain corn syrup sometimes with vanilla flavoring or molasses added. Some parts of the country, people would eat molasses on pancakes. Probably still do. These habits predate the invention of HFCS, let alone its use in food.