Recipe 21: Crumpets

Crumpets were a nice change to bake! Very different from all the recipes, as this is a batter rather than a dough. Though in this recipe there is probably double the amount of yeast used than in normal bread and you can really tell from smell and how much it rises!
It's a really quick (well, 2hrs) and fun recipe, when reading about making Crumpets, it looks scary but it's not too much of a change to making Pancakes! This recipe from Paul Hollywood's book is in the April edition of delicious. magazine as it's a baking special!


So the recipe starts like a normal bread recipe with the flour and yeast, the salt is added in later. You heat the milk up a little and then add that into the water then beat into the flour and yeast mixture until it makes a nice smooth batter, a nice change from kneading!

Once you've made the batter you then have to leave for 2 hours and it's so cool how it rises, I loved it! It was sticking to the cling film in the end there was no room for it to rise! It's so sad as once this process is over you then have to beat the salt and bicarbonate of soda into the mixture so then it all floats back to original batter size but you can really tell it is a lot more sponge like than before! Once you've beaten these in, leave to rest for a further 10 minutes.

Then I finally got to use my crumpet rings, on a heated pan, place them down and pour the batter filling the rings till about half way. You then leave them to cook (or bake?!) for around 6 minutes.

Once the bottom of the crumpet is cooked, it is then time to slide the ring off and flip (not like a pancake though) on the other side but this time for only 2 minutes. This part took ages as I only had 2 rings and each crumpet takes 10 minutes each so I think I was out there for about an hour making over 15 of them!

When they are all baked you can either eat them straight away or leave them to cool so you can toast them later on!

Reviews? I haven't had a proper opinion yet as we might have them for breakfast tomorrow! Alice tried one and said it was nice, though she didn't eat all of it – hmm!

Note: I just want to add that the packet mix in the picture is not mine, would never use one of those! :P It's Alice's as she is useless at baking! haha