Pancake art recipe

5.00 stars from 96 reviews

This is the 'secret sauce' that provides batter like some of the top pros use to make their amazingly detailed pancake art. Just follow this recipe to make batter that you can put into your pancake pen. That affiliate link will take you to the same product we use and the same Amazon seller we purchased from and had a good experience with.

This recipe also creates good tasting pancakes and is easy and fast to make, even if you don't plan on making pancake art with it. It's also dairy free and you can substitute for cassava flour if you want gluten free.

There's some difference of opinion in the Pancake Art world on whether the consistency of the batter should be similar to icing or ketchup. Having tried both ways, we find that the icing type consistency this recipe produces has yielded better pancake art. If you want a ketchup consistency though, you can follow this recipe and just add a little more water and/or a little less flour.

This batter is also ideal for the fine detail pro pens as well.

You can make shapes with just the batter or if you want a combination of dark and light colors, you can draw some areas first and cook them longer than areas you color last. If you want colors, you can add food coloring to the batter. If you want to eat them, use foods such as chocolate syrup, fruit syrup, etc. to color the batter. Otherwise, if you're looking for professional looking pancakes and don't need to eat them, you can use a vibrant professional quality food coloring.

Ingredients

SERVES 2

• 2 eggs
• 1 1/8 cup water
• 4 cups of flour
• Optional: food coloring as desired.

Directions

1. Thoroughly mix all of your ingredients at once. If you want to make your best possible pancake art, use a blender. Make sure there are no lumps and the batter is totally smooth:
   
   
   If you're just making easy pancakes to eat and not using a pancake pen, don't use a blender and leave lumps since they can add more fluff to your pancakes.
2. Pour your batter into a pancake pen:
   
   
   If you're just making easy pancakes to eat and not using a pancake pen, just make them as you would our quick pancake recipe for fluffy flavorful pancakes.
3. Draw a shape & fill it in by squeezing the batter onto a pan. You can do this while the heat is off and only turn on the heat after you're happy with how your art looks. If you do turn the heat on prior to drawing, be sure not to touch the cooking surface as it will be hot and you don't want to burn yourself:
   
   
   
4. Let it cook and flip it with a spatula, then let the other side cook as you would a regular pancake:
   
   
   

If you enjoy making pancake art and want to get deeper into it, you can check out some of our pancake articles. For example, you could read our most in-depth article on how to make pancake art. You can also find more tools to help you with making pancake art on our tools & supplies page.

Here are some common questions people have related to our pancake art recipe:

Can cookie cutters be used as pancake molds?

Absolutely! Here are some designed specifically for pancake art: pancake templates. You can also use those for eggs. If you have metal cookie cutters, you can use those too. If they're lead, aluminum or most metals besides stainless steel, avoid using them on a hot cooking surface to reduce the potential leakage of toxic metals.

If you have plastic cookie cutters, metal you don't want to heat on your cooking surface, or are not sure what type of metal they are, you can cook regular pancakes (without the cookie cutters) a size larger than the cookie cutters and use the cookie cutters to cut out the shapes from your circular pancakes. If the pancakes are piping hot, let them cool down before cutting them.

This pancake art recipe would work well or else you could cook any of our pancake recipes.

What is the best temperature for pancake art?

If you're going for fine details, you can leave the heat off as you draw. If you'd rather get them cooked faster, you can heat it up first. If you start with heat, just draw fast enough that the first lines you draw won't burn before the last lines you draw are cooked.

In any case, you can cook at temperatures up to and including medium heat (roughly 220 degrees fahrenheit). We don't recommend higher than that since it can blur your details and any colors could fade to brown.

How do you flip a pancake without ruining it?

A key to flipping the pancake without damaging it is to use a thin spatula. For standard size pancakes, we recommend a fish spatula. The fish spatula we use is the KitchenAid Classic Flex Turner.

Just go all around the pancake, carefully trying to get your spatula under the pancake without scraping the underside where your drawing is and without the pancake scrunching or ripping. Once you have it loose, just get your spatula under it and flip it.

If you're making extra large pancakes and they might rip when you lift them off the cooking surface, we recommend getting a wide steel spatula. You may be able to do the same technique with the wide steel spatula, but if you can't get around the pancake as well, you could use a smaller spatula to break the pancake free from the cooking surface and flip with the larger one.