I decided to start off with a very easy looking recipe that I'd torn out of a magazine (Family Circle? Woman's Own?) some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It was when Shirley Goode was a famous ultra-thrifty TV cook, and she wrote several books and magazine articles about cooking. This particular article had the snappy title "How to feed a family of four on £21 a week" and included recipes for three meals a day for the whole family. The recipes are amazingly tasty and economical - although if you followed the plan exactly, you'd spend a lot more than £21 now, you would still get a really good selection of varied and healthy meals for very little money. Some of the recipes were a tremendous help to us during the 1980s, when one income, two young children and mortgage interest rates of about 15% meant that every penny counted! Yet I'd not tried every recipe in it - the crumpet recipe, using just bread mix, water, bicarb soda and a little milk is one that I'd never tried. And what a great way to learn the cooking technique before moving on to making them from scratch.
Now everything went beautifully except that although bubbles rose to the tops of the crumpets, as you can see from the photo, very few of them burst. I kept on cooking them for longer, thinking maybe they would eventually burst, but the batter was firming up over the bubbles, and leaving them any longer would burn the bases. So when I turned them over to cook the tops, they came out looking more like muffin than a crumpet. Yet the insides have that familiar airy texture of a crumpet.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the CRUFFIN - a cross between a crumpet and a muffin. We've just demolished some of them topped with scrambled eggs and bacon, and very tasty they were too!
I'm sharing this with Recipe Clippings at Farmersgirl Kitchen
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Well done, I remember Shirley Goode and loved Family Circle. I had the same thought when watching GBBO for comic relief, but I don't have time this weekend to make crumpets, one day... Thanks for joining me for #recipeclippings
ReplyDeleteThank you for your perfectly timed post! My OH has been hankering after crumpets recently but they're not sold here in Spain. Now I can make my own. I just need to find something for the rings - do you think egg rings would work?
ReplyDeleteMine are actually supposed to be egg rings! And as well as those, you could cut strips of card and stick them into circles then cover them with foil, but that would be quite wasteful as you wouldn't be able to reuse them. In fact the batter is very thick so if you aren't woriried about getting perfect circles I think they would work without rings at all
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