PancakeBot Turns Breakfast Into A Delicious Art Show
This article is more than 2 years old
According to popular logic, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so why shouldn’t you be able to create whatever you want to eat? Assuming, that is, what you want to eat is a pancake for which roundness is a thing of the past. Enter the PancakeBot, the robo-chef that turns your designs into carb-heavy syrup-soakers. We live in truly wonderful times.
While I thought Pee Wee Herman had the greatest breakfast-making machine ever, it seems like PancakeBot might take that title. Created by Norway’s Miguel Valenzuela, he originally turned his daughter’s request into a working product back in 2010, when he created the first iteration out of LEGO blocks and ketchup dispensers. He displayed his work online with a YouTube video, which then went viral and gave him the exposure and confidence he needed to build expanded versions. Valenzuela and his wife Runi eventually took PancakeBot to the World Maker Faire in New York in 2012.
Cut to last week, when the couple displayed their wares at the Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, showing off the new and improved (and completely LEGO-free) PancakeBot. Now this invention looks more like a machine you’d see in a pancake-loving mad scientist’s lab, instead of just a really badass LEGO creation in an ambitious stoner’s basement. But enough jabbering. Let’s see this sucker in action.
Below you’ll witness just how easy it is to make French landmarks out of batter. Speaking of, it’s worth mentioning that PancakeBot has arguably the best tagline for any product in history, with the asterisked “Batter is Not Included.” Le genius.
At some point, I think I would start designing gross looking bugs, and then I wouldn’t be able to break free from that cycle. Valenzuela and his family recently created some animals of their own for one of the strangest short films imaginable, as a pancake horse gallops through the old west, complete with bacon tumbleweeds. Enjoy.
Spectacular stuff, right? It makes me jealous, since my only experience with turning food into art is spilling mayonnaise and salsa and calling it A Starry Night just so I don’t have to clean up a mess. And to think it all started with this.
Just think, interstate exits across the country may one day be homes to International Houses of PancakeBots. I think I can hear my Mickey Mouse waffle maker sobbing into my slow cooker.
