Pancake Spirograph

I’ve been working on making spirographic pancakes lately – Spirocakes.  Here’s the latest iteration of the “Pangraph,” a ring gear that fits over the frying pan and acts just like the old Spirograph toy:

It’s time-consuming to cut out the gears, so I didn’t want to just make random ones.  It was fun to work out which gears would make the most interesting patterns and be compatible with both the 35- and 36-tooth ring gears.

I even got to make use of the program I wrote 10 years ago to draw these patterns (technically called hypotrochoids and epitrochoids), to see what kinds of patterns I could expect to see with different gear sizes.