This Mother’s Day, instead of making Mom wait until dinnertime to enjoy a meal made just for her, treat her to a special morning treat of breakfast in bed. Deliciously easy to make in a hurry, pancakes are a no-fuss dish that both grownups and little ones crave, and they can be as simply or elegantly prepared as you like. Boxed mixes may indeed be convenient on hectic weekdays, but the taste and texture of a mix can’t compare to light, fluffy from-scratch pancakes, which are quick to prepare with everyday baking ingredients. Check out Food Network’s top-five pancake recipes below to find top-rated classic and dressed-up picks alike, then browse Mother’s Day Central for more tips on cooking for Mom.

5. Oatmeal Cookie Pancakes — Just as oatmeal cookies are made with oats, cinnamon and raisins, so, too, are Rachael’s kid-friendly pancakes, ready to enjoy in less than 25 minutes.

4. Tri-Berry Oven Pancakes — More like Dutch babies than traditional pancakes, Ina’s thin, golden-brown beauties are scented with orange zest and finished with mixed berries.

Get the top three recipes

Here in Food Network Kitchens, we love simple, classic recipes. We are also paid to think about food all day. So we’ve taken classic foods and drinks and reimagined them into three, four or five different ways. No standard recipes here, just the occasional technique and pictures. Think of it as a picture recipe.

Pancakes are a great way to personalize breakfast. From bacon and corn to triple chocolate, these tasty flapjacks will definitely spice up the most important meal of the day. Here are five of our new favorite pancake recipes.

First, start with the classic version

When I was seven years old, my grandmother gave me a cookbook written for kids. It was something she’d picked up at a museum gift shop and knew I’d love. My mom was not so pleased when it arrived, as she was never a huge fan of cooking with kids. In her mind, meal prep was strictly about efficiency. Adding my sister or me to the mix instantly made things drastically less efficient. Still, once in a while, she’d give in to my pleas and help me make something from the book.

When I turned eight, something happened that opened up my ability to bond with this cookbook of mine. Both my parents started working on Saturday mornings and we had a babysitter watch us until they came home. This babysitter was the teen-age daughter of friends and she was all of 13 (it was the mid-’80s, that’s how it worked back then). She was happy to let me cook, as it kept me busy and she got to help eat whatever I made.

Before you preheat your oven, read these tips

On last night’s season premiere of Worst Cooks in America, we were introduced to 16 new “recruits,” each nominated by family and friends for their atrocious cooking skills. They were split into two teams: Team Anne and Team Bobby.

For their first challenge, the teams were tasked to make breakfast: pancakes, bacon and eggs. Their mentors showed them how to make their favorite version of a pancake, plus four basic ways to make eggs: poached, sunny-side up, over-easy and scrambled.

As Bobby is getting his feet wet as a first-timer on this show, he quickly realized that he couldn’t take teaching his team for granted when Vinnie Caligiuri asked him whether cinnamon sticks would melt in maple syrup when heated on the stove.

After tasting all their dishes, it was evident that making pancakes isn’t as easy as it looks. Too heavy, not cooked all the way through and forgetting flour were just some of the mistakes that both Bobby and Anne dealt with.

Have you run into these same problems at home? If you want to make super-fluffy pancakes, Anne says to fold in egg whites.

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Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day, so I was really excited to put together our online Breakfast feature. After the pancake explosion I created for Mother’s Day, I tried to focus mostly on bacon and eggs for this one. But the carb-lover inside me couldn’t resist adding French toast and sticky buns. (I love to watch Bobby struggle with baking in Throwdown: Sticky Buns)

And, of course, I added muffin recipes. Muffins are a great grab-and-go breakfast treat, and they usually freeze well, so they can be a cheap, healthy, home-made frozen pastry. Ina’s Blueberry Muffins look like the most-loved on FoodNetwork.com, but Sunny’s Sunny Morning Muffins caught my eye.

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