Falcon staffers get smart for pancake art

Photo by Elaine Fan and Sanjana Melkote

The finished products - one chick, panda, and cat made entirely of pancake batter.

This year, the baking adventures of our fellow Falcon staffers have led to mediocre and even disastrous results. So when we were given the challenge of creating our very own pancake masterpiece, we were nervous, yet also excited.

At first, we were intimidated by the intricate pieces of pancake art we’d seen all over Facebook and YouTube, which featured perfectly drawn pancakes of our favorite cartoon characters, such as Pikachu, Yoda, and Spiderman, and even shaded images of real people. Luckily, we found much simpler alternatives as we scoured the internet.

Consulting the pancake gurus of the web, we browsed through instructions for what seemed like a fairly simple task: Use food coloring to dye pancake batter, fill it in squeeze bottles, draw on a pan and voila! Pancake art!

With our hearts filled with the encouraging words of various bloggers, we met over winter break to put our skills to the test.

Elaine was in charge of prepping the pancake batter by following a simple online recipe. Remembering the articles she’d read, she added extra milk to make the batter more runny, which would allow the batter to easily go through the small tips of the squeeze bottles.

While stirring the concoction, Elaine realized that it would be impossible to draw shapes with the batter since it ran straight off her spoon. She ended up tossing in unknown amounts of flour to get a good consistency and then threw in some more sugar to balance it out.

Hoping she hadn’t destroyed the batter altogether, Elaine colored a portion of it pink with some old crusty food dye, then used a spoon to draw a simple heart enclosed in a circle. When Sanjana arrived at Elaine’s house, we tasted the cooked pancake and were pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t bad.

However, to create pancake batters with different colors and consistencies, we started tossing random handfuls of flour and coloring agents, such as food dye and cocoa powder, into the mixture. Before long, we’d given up on preserving the taste of the pancakes altogether.

Sanjana’s pencil-shaped squeeze bottles turned out to be useless, as the tips were far too tiny for the pancake batter to go through. We decided to use a ziplock bag with a hole cut at the corner, which was messy, but eventually got the job done.

Surprisingly, a pair of chopsticks turned out to be our saving grace. Whenever we made a mistake on a tiny nose or eye for one of our cartoon animal characters, we’d just pick it up with a pair of chopsticks and try again.

The first real pancake we attempted to make was the face of Hello Kitty, complete with a pink bow and whiskers. We didn’t exactly think the process through and ended up running around the kitchen in a panic to find a stray chopstick or spoon.

Tension was thick in the air as Elaine tried to wiggle the spatula under the pancake, ready for the grand reveal. When she successfully flipped the pancake and saw the result, we erupted in elated screams. Even though Hello Kitty was slightly lopsided, we still thought she was beautiful.

We couldn’t believe that we’d created our very own piece of pancake art, and felt incredibly accomplished as we displayed it to Elaine’s family.

Throughout our chaotic attempt at pancake art, we experimented with different tools and materials to get the result we wanted. A lot of the time, there were disastrous results, but at other times, straying from the rulebook proved to be worthwhile. The outline of most of the pancakes was done with a dark brown pancake mixture, but in the absence of brown food coloring, cocoa powder was added to darken the mix. We were able to stay true to the original design thanks to this addition.

In the end, flecks of pancake batter were scattered over every inch of the countertop, and a haphazard pile of batter covered cups and bowls toppled in the sink. At one point, Elaine’s fingers were dyed in a bright shade of red that was impossible to get off, and everything she touched suffered a similar fate.

Sanjana left early, cleverly escaping the nightmarish task of cleaning up the kitchen. And one major lesson Elaine learned was not to host a pancake art party any time soon.