Pancake Critters

A few weeks ago I came across an article in Reader's Digest about pancake recipes - they had all sorts of cool ideas, so I cut/pasted (in the literal sense) the ones I liked to a recipe card, which I brought with me when I visited my parents' home over break. The top two contenders were lacy pancakes and rainbow pancakes.

So intricate...

... so colorful!

Let's do a mashup!

The ingredients for these are pretty basic (beyond typical pancake fixin's) - a squeeze bottle for the lacy pancakes and food coloring for the rainbow ones. When I found a yellow squeeze bottle (originally for mustard) in the picnic section of Dollar General for 50 cents, it was on! My mom and I whipped up some pancake batter (using almond milk - yay lactose intolerance!) and added in green food coloring until we liked the shade. Then we used a funnel and poured it into our squeeze bottle. I should note that the bottle's nozzle was a bit narrow at first, so we snipped off the end of it to make a bigger passageway for the batter beforehand. Now we were ready to make lacy, delicate pancakes! Except, the first attempt was too lacy and broke apart. And the second attempt looked like this:

Yeah... that's supposed to be a flower - when my dad saw the picture, he said, "Oh, an amoeba!" Luckily, it gave my mom an idea, or else we would have canned the whole thing.

She set to work on a fresh creation...

... and made this little guy! Yes, the candy eyes have made another appearance. :)















I thought that was pretty spiffy, so I decided to slightly display some terp affiliation and try my own little turtle:

And he came out SO GOOD! And then I ate him.















After those successes, we let our imaginations take over and had all sorts of fun making and eating our critters. Check them out! And TRY THIS YOURSELF! Especially if you have kids. It's super easy and super fun!

Swirly Snail

A Crab!

Dragonfly

Even a Monkey!

Pancake Fish!