Unicorn Pancake Art – How to shape your crepe

How can you make pancake day even more fun than usual? By doing some pancake art!

You’ve probably seen pictures of beautiful pancakes that look like animals, your favourite Disney characters or even celebrities but did you know that a simple pancake ‘picture’ is surprisingly easy to do, and that you only need one piece of special equipment that only costs a couple of quid?

First of all though – how do you make pancake art?

The trick is in having your pan nice and hot before you start (and greased if it isn’t non-stick). The way that the pictures are created is by the darker parts cooking longest – so you draw an outline and some of the details, let it cook for a little bit, add some more details that you want to be paler in colour, and finally fill in the rest. 

You can buy special frying pans that have an outline on the pan itself for you to follow – looking at U.K. websites for example I’ve found this sausage dog (dachshund) pancake art, Peppa Pig pancake art, and Unicorn pancake art – and that’s just for starters. The thing is, these pans are not particularly cheap for a novelty item (fair enough if you need a new frying pan anyway) and there’s no need to limit yourself to just one shape for your crepe.

In actual fact, you don’t need much artistic ability at all to be able to make simple pictures and characters, like this unicorn which I did totally freehand. Scroll down to find out the simple piece of equipment you need….

Say hello to the humble sauce bottle. All you need to create your own pancake art is a squeezy bottle with a small tip – you could even use a piping bag if you are confident but a plastic bottle is easy to pick up and put down when you are doing each stage. 

Easy pancake batter recipe

The easy way I remember my pancake batter recipe is 1, 2, 3 – that is, 100g plain flour, 2 eggs, 300ml milk. Mix them all together in a jug then pour a little oil into a pan. When the pan is hot pour in your pancake batter.

Here’s another pancake that I made… it started out as an attempt at the cartoon dog Bluey but I think looks more like Scooby Doo (though that is being generous!).

If you are new to pancake art, I recommend finding a simple shape to copy, whether that’s a picture from Google images or something you have at home e.g. a picture from a book (Peppa Pig is actually quite an easy shape to do). But pancake art is meant to be fun, so it doesn’t matter if your design isn’t perfect. Though once you get the hang of it, you could get multiple squeezy bottles, add some food colouring to each one, and make colourful pancake art!