Mrs Cake: Homemade English Muffins

Today is Mr Cake's birthday, and his one request was to have homemade English muffins for lunch (we'd seen the recipe online a while ago and he was pretty set on it (I definitely wasn't against the idea, either!).

It's a pretty simple recipe (especially if you have a breadmaker, but we don't and it still wasn't much effort). Make a dough, roll it out, cut circles (or any shape you want if you're breaking with tradition);

fry them in a pan;

smother in butter and jam, eat.

Recipe
Ingredients
1 3/4 cups milk, warm
45g butter
1 1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbsp sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
4 1/4 cups flour
2 tsp yeast

Method
Combine all ingredients in a bowl or in your breadmaker. If using the breadmaker set on dough; if doing it the manual way mix together until you have a sticky dough, knead a bit (about 5 minutes - I was making it up as I went along really but it worked out wonderfully!) then leave to rise for half an hour in a warm place.

The dough won't rise very much so don't panic if it doesn't double in size; it's not supposed to. Now flour a surface and roll it out to be about 2cm thick. Cut into shapes as desired (I believe a 7.5cm circle cutter is the 'proper' type but whatever suits you!). Rest for another 20 minutes.

Heat a frypan over a low to medium heat and sprinkle with cornmeal (we skipped this so it's optional but probably tasty!), then cook the muffins for 5-7 minutes on each side. Check the first ones after about three minutes to check they're not too dark and adjust heat accordingly.

Serve warm with lashings of clotted cream and jam (heh, just wanted an excuse to sound like Enid Blyton) or cool and toast as required.

Ours were quite doughy but we like that and when we realised after the first batch how good they were we turned the heat up a bit so they cooked faster on the outside but kept the middle ever so slightly undercooked.