Pancake Cereal Is The Latest Hack-Recipe To Take Over TikTok

Every week in quarantine brings a new TikTok recipe. Some run-of-the-mill ingredients get a makeover on TikTok, and out of sheer boredom, thousands of people test it out until it finally goes viral. This week, TikTok reached a new high with 2 billion downloads. And shelter-in-place orders across the world have made more people spend more time online and in their kitchens, with limited supplies.

Recipes like dalgona coffee and the White Claw slushie tend to blow up on TikTok and are equal parts recipes and hacks. The newest trending recipe, which is for Pancake Cereal, arrived on TikTok earlier this week and the hashtag #pancakecereal now has over five million views. Pancake Cereal is the perfect start to the weekend, what better way to eat pancakes than by the spoonful, from a bowl of syrup and milk?

Start by preparing pancake batter — any pancake recipe will work here and that's the beauty of it. Aunt Jemima, Bisquick, that three-ingredient vegan pancake recipe that uses bananas and eggs, literally anything will work. However, it's important that your batter is runny when it's finished, you want it to look like this, otherwise, it will be hard to dot onto the pan. So if your batter is on the thicker side, thin it out with either milk or water until it's smooth and falls off your spoon in one long ribbon.

Now for the fun part: pour the batter into a Ziploc bag, twist the top, and snip the smallest section off the corner as you possibly can. You can also use a plastic bottle with a hole poked through the lid, a rinsed easy-squeeze ketchup bottle, or even freehand it with the spoon. But the plastic-bag method will make you feel most like a chef.

Use a nonstick pan and pre-heat it on the stove. Add coconut oil or butter and then dot the batter onto the pan so the "cereal" doesn’t stick. The smaller the better, but there is such a thing as too small. You want to make them small enough that you can fit several on a regular spoon, but not so small that they burn before they're fully cooked.

When you play around with the size of popular dishes, you open yourself up to a world of possibilities. When you make pancake cereal, their small size makes them way easier to cook, you have way more crispy edges, and your pancake-to-syrup ratio will be sinfully balanced.

But this dish isn't called "Mini Pancakes," it’s called "Pancake Cereal." It's called Pancake Cereal because you pour the pancakes into a bowl and eat them by the spoonful as you would cereal. You'll find that when you eat pancake cereal, there are way more crispy buttery edges to enjoy and the syrup is not absorbed as quickly, so you set yourself up for mouthful after mouthful of rich, buttery, syrupy pancakes cut by cold refreshing milk.