Would you pay $300 for the ability to make a pancake in any shape you like? Well, thanks to a successfully funded Kickstarter project, you’ll get your chance to do so.
You may remember last year we wrote about a 3D printer that can process food into virtually any shape and design you like. Understandably some people were a bit queasy about the idea of printing a burger, complete with bun, cheese and a bean patty.
PancakeBot may assuage some of those fears as it’s very much a unitasker and is designed to work solely with batter, which is at least a material that can easily be used in the same way as ink. The device is actually a hybrid of a 3D printer and a griddle, with the batter being dispensed directly onto the hot surface.
The promotional video suggests there’s still some room for human involvement (and error) as you’ll need to manually flip the pancake in the brief window between it being done enough on one side to hold its shape, and being so done it burns and loses flavor.
One neat element is that the “printing” doesn’t merely replicate the shape you have drawn, but also the order in which you drew the lines and then ‘filled in’ each section. This allows you to draw specific areas first, which will be exposed to the heat longer and thus be darker, allowing shading.
As of press time, the project had received almost three times its target of $50,000, with nearly a month left to run.
While $300 certainly seems a huge amount for something that’s going to be somewhat of a gimmick for home use, no matter how creative your kids are, the designers appear to be targeting the commercial market. They suggest it could be used as an eyecatching promotional tool, for example at trade fairs, printing pancakes in the form of a corporate logo.
It could also be a good gimmick for cafes, allowing them to sell pancakes that fit in with a specific holiday or even a topical event. For example, I can definitely see a diner getting media coverage by offering customers a choice of pancakes with the faces of two Presidential candidates as an informal opinion poll.