One cook has turned his kitchen into his studio, creating artworks with a breakfast serving of pancakes.
What started as simple shapes made from pancake batter to amuse his children has turned into three-dimensional sculptures and replicas of famous artworks.
Michael Goudeau spends hours creating edible art, sharing photographs of his pancake masterpieces on his blog before it is gobbled up for breakfast in what he calls his ‘madness’.
On his blog The Pancake Project, the 53-year-old calls himself a ‘pancake artist’ and that ‘the time has come to reveal my madness’.
Breakfast never looked so artistic, with pancake batter whipped into replicas of other foods such as tacos, steak and chips, Christmas trees or a mouse caught in a trap complete with red syrup to show his sticky end. Artist Edvard Munch would surely be licking his lips had he seen Mr Goudeau’s attempt to recreate his famous painting The Scream.
Mr Goudeau, a professional juggler from Las Vegas, Nevada said: ‘I make pancakes for breakfast for my children Emily, 10, and Joey, 12. This started when they were very young. I wanted to make something that would get them excited about eating so I made the first letter of each of their names. They loved them and their excitement led me to up my game.’
The pancake artist uses a bottle with a nozzle to pipe intricate sections and adjusts the cooking heat to control the colour and texture of the batter.
He said: ‘I put the batter into a squeeze bottle, and I found I could do letters and easy shapes and designs. For the first couple of years I only worked with getting different tones of brown by timing the placement of different parts of the batter. The next step into crazy was the idea that I could make a three dimensional pancake. I made a pig’s face, several regular pancakes and a pig’s butt and threaded them all onto a breakfast sausage and put the whole thing into a pool of syrup. That lead to the 3D snail with a syrup trail all the way across the table and then into a new technique of stacking different pancake pieces to build something complex. Mr Goudeau then experimented with food colouring, using it to recreate almost real looking replicas.
He said: ‘My next discovery was how well pancake batter accepts food colouring, if you put in a lot of it you get very vibrant colours. I made a colour wheel to demonstrate this but my favourite version of these is the Christmas tree.                    –DM