Crumpets

Ok, don’t lie, who isn’t just sliiiightly intrigued by the royal wedding hype? I mean, come on. It’s like the Academy Awards, the Inauguration, and the Jolie-Pitts wrapped into one Big British 5 A.M. event. I feel like there are women out there, donned in fanny packs and sweatpants, sitting on stoops with their five cats, who are STILL talking about Princess Diana’s wedding. What if, in twenty years, I too am a stoop-dwelling woman with sweatpants and cats? And what if I missed this wedding? What will I talk about with my peer spinster demographic? This is un-miss-able.

If nothing else, the British media’s comical coverage is worth watching (at least for 5 minutes, until you feel your brain cells dying at a rate comparable to heroin use). I mean, I know our media is pretty terrible, but British mainstream media makes Us Weekly look like the Wall Street Journal. What is going on over there?

To honor this private-couples-commitment-turned-media-mania-watched-by-2-billion-people, I figured whipping up some British cuisine was a must. And what’s more British than crumpets? Second question: what are crumpets? After some Wikipedia-ing, I discovered that these things are like pancakes only with a ton of yeast and baking soda to give them some airy-oomph. Sounds good to me.

I used to get the jitters when it came to using yeast in recipes. But, it’s really not that big of a deal. Basically, yeast, like most living things, likes warm baths and sugar. Run your tap until warm water comes out… warm enough that you would wash your first-born in it, but not so hot that it scalds your hand to hold it under the faucet. Measure out 1 cup of this baby-bath-temperature water, and mix it with 2 teaspoons of honey until the honey dissolves. Sprinkle on one package of dry active yeast. Stir it once to get the yeast wet, and then let it hang out for ten minutes until the yeast gets active and foamy.

While you wait, sieve your flour and salt together in a big bowl. Use strong flour (AKA baker’s flour or bread flour… it has many names) instead of all-purpose flour. Strong flour has more gluten, and stretches better with rising yeast dough than all-purpose flour. You can find strong/bakers/bread flour in most grocery stores.

Put on ⅔ cup of milk in a saucepan and heat it to the same baby-bath temperature (this only takes a minute).

After ten minutes, pour your frothy yeast mixture into your flour bowl with your ¾ cup of warm milk and another cup of warm water. Mix it well with your hands. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it hang out in a warm place for an hour (in the laundry room? Over your oven? Wherever works). After an hour, it should be bubbly and slightly enlarged.

Mix 1 teaspoon of baking soda with 2 tablespoons of warm water and thoroughly mix this in with your dough. You will knock out a lot of bubbles, but don’t worry, they come back. Cover the dough again, and let it hang out for another 15 minutes.

Heat a frying pan (or a pancake griddle if you have one) on a medium heat. Butter the insides of a couple of metal pastry rings, a place them on the griddle. You can butter the griddle if you like as well. Pour the batter into each pastry ring, filling them ¾ of the way to the top. Cook for 5-10 minutes, until bubbles rise to the surface and the top looks dry. Flip them to sear the final side for two minutes and then remove the crumpet from the griddle.

If, when you flip it, the bottom side is burned, your frying pan heat is too high. Turn it down and try again with a new batch! Practice makes perfect. You can fork these apart English-muffin-style to toast and butter them for breakfast!

Recipe: