The Mini Pancake Cereal Trend That Solves Breakfast

For many of us, self-quarantine has turned us—as reliably as a flower turns to face the light—towards carbs. It’s not a value judgment; it’s just a fact. Maybe weekly pizza night has turned into every-other-pizza-night. Perhaps nachos seem more like a breakfast food than ever before! TikTok, that odd Gen-Z and millennial favorite that helps coin and cement trends, is the source of a new carb-session: mini pancake cereal.

What the what? Check it out!

You’re not alone if it’s confusing. But for anyone who prefers the crisp, buttery ridges of a pancake to its creamy interior, it’s darn tempting. You simply use your favorite pancake recipe, grab your griddle, a pancake pen or squeeze bottle (or even a plastic bag with the corner snipped), flip the pancakes using a mini spatula or chopstick (pro tip from our buddies at Real Simple), and serve it up!

What we’ve gleaned from obsessing over this online trend is that you want to serve these babies with syrup and salted butter, not milk, which apparently turns the whole thing into a soggy mess. (The salted butter tip comes from Daniela Galarza, a trained-pastry-chef-turned-features-editor over at Serious Eats!) Makes sense, given that you’re drizzling a bunch of syrup over the whole thing.

Mini mini seems to be a trend that will never die, as does riffing on cereal. Eight million people watched the Bon Appétit pastry chef try to make Lucky Charms. You can make your own cinnamon toast crunch cereal (really!) You can even make tiny cookies and pour milk over them and call it “cereal,” because you’re a grownup, you can do what you want, and hey, life is pretty weird right now!

Apparently this “cereal” works just as well with mixes as it does with homemade recipes (ahem, we of course like ours). You need a decent griddle, cast-iron or nonstick pan, good syrup, which makes anything better, a decent way to flip them, and our pancake pen or a good facsimile, like a squeeze bottle.

Does the whole thing make you want to throw up your hands? We understand. Make dinosaur pancakes instead, and be a kid at heart in your own way. Or keep it simple, and eat granola. It’s just breakfast, and—as is true with life—you can play it straight or weird. Just like TikTok.