If breakfast is really the most important meal of the day, Nathan Shields has a leg up. For the last two years, he's been preparing amazing art pancakes for his kids – shaped like everything from fractals to highly detailed characters from The Hobbit– and documenting his efforts online.
"I started making them two years ago, when my family moved overseas to Saipan and I found myself in charge of the children," Shields told WIRED. Now back in Washington, Shields has graduated from ladle, to turkey baster, to condiment bottle, and worked his way through a stunning array of themes. Some of his pancakes illustrate local flora and fauna, microbes, or mathematical principles; others veer into more fanciful territory, like Pokémon and Middle Earth. A few even have interactive components: monsters with modular facial features, dinosaurs with movable jaws, and even a 3-D tree house.
Shields is a former math teacher and a professional artist, specializing in speed-drawing videos – a skill set, he says, that's been helpful at the griddle. His background in secondary mathematics education has found its way into his designs as well. He's made pancakes in the likenesses of mathematicians from Maria Agnesi to Linus Pauling and platonic solids to delicate fractals.
So far, the more theoretical pancakes are mostly lost on their lucky recipients, five-year-old Gryphon and three-year-old Alice, who prefer more hands-on fare. "So far the kids' favorites have been the interactive pancakes," said Shields, "the Angry Birds that are served by flinging them through the air, or the monster and pirate faces made by mixing and matching features."
For budding pancake artists, Shields offers the following advice: "A condiment bottle makes the batter easier to control." Still, he says, skill isn't everything: "If the purpose is to make your kids smile, then a weird, ugly pancake is still better than a round one."
Images courtesy Nathan Shields
