The thinking woman's crumpet.

The last but one post started by mentioning optimism and hope for the future.  Speaking of which, I have met a lovely man (several months ago) who has been instrumental in my recent rediscovery of the crumpet.

A friend tried on Facebook earlier this month to settle the debate "crumpets n jam vs crumpets n cheese". 119 comments later, jam had 21 votes, but cheese won with 36. Many other options were suggested, including both jam and cheese at the same time, peanut butter both with and without jam, Nutella, Marmite, marmalade, golden syrup, fried egg, my personal favourite topping of fried bananas with Malibu... and of course there were the "butter only" purists. 

I've never made my own crumpets (maybe one day, my sister once did and she said they weren't all that difficult) but I got to thinking what creative thing you could do with a shop-bought crumpet apart from simply spreading something on it.  I'd previously seen a photo of a Full English Crumpet sandwich with bacon, egg, sausage and baked beans in the middle; but today I found a twist on eggy bread using crumpets, which I hadn't previously considered.  I beat two eggs with a splash of milk, seasoning, and a little bit of cinnamon and nutmeg and soaked three crumpets in this mixture while I preheated the frying pan.  I cooked them on both sides in oil, pouring a little more egg mixture into the holey sides and in the pan to get a little "omeletty" effect around the edge.  Topped with grilled bacon and a drizzle of maple syrup they were a revelation!

Here's a photo of the full English crumpet:

As a little treat, here are a couple of crumpet-related videos for you.  You may need to copy and paste the links.  The first is the Wombles, a throwback to my childhood. I especially like Tobermory's exclamation at about 2 minutes and 10 seconds in:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwBibF-YfBY 

The other is the ever fabulous Muppets Warburton's giant crumpets advert:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp_WNfa7PGY 

Enjoy! And thanks for reading,

Caroline x

Tiers of happiness - part 2

At the end of part 1 - we had got as far as the wedding cake being baked and ready for it's posh dressing up.  Eventually it looked like this:

It wasn't really as wonky as it looked in the photo.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. The cake needed icing, and it needed marzipan before that. The cakes were almost flat so I didn't bother to trim them. I checked them with my culinary spirit level (yes really) and neither of the three were that far out so I thought it would all be fine.  The traditional glue for sticking marzipan to cakes is apricot jam, but I had some marmalade in the cupboard so I used that instead, two parts marmalade to one part water, warm in a mug in the microwave and apply with a pastry brush. The marzipan was rolled out, draped over each cake and smoothed down with icing sugar dusted hands and sort of massaged until it was as smooth as I could get it. Sort of like beauty therapy for cakes!  They were left to dry out overnight before icing.

The icing was applied in a similar fashion (nearly 2 kilos of it for the three cakes!) except that it was stuck to the marzipan with vanilla vodka rather than marmalade glaze.  Yes, the vodka happened to be hanging around too. I used ready made sugarpaste icing from the cake decorating shop rather than making it, which I don't think is cheating really... After some judicious trimming and much smoothing out, and a second beauty therapy for cakes session, the three cakes were suitably enrobed in their double cloaks of marzipan and icing and left to dry for a few more days.

My daughter had decided she wanted to decorate them, so one day while I was at work she spent most of a day being creative.  Using our new piping nozzles, and a LOT of red food colouring paste, butter and icing sugar, and an amazing amount of creativity and general cleverness, she ended up with several different designs of flowers in shades of pink and red around the edges of the larger two cakes, and completely covering the smallest one. At one point she diced with disaster by having the cakes overhanging the edge of the work surface, but didn't notice until she looked at the photos afterwards!  Meanwhile, I spent my lunch break buying two and a half metres of red ribbon.  The colour of the washing up water had to be seen to be believed!

After reading about it in the cake bible, we had decided to use shot glasses for pillars, which worked really well.  As the cakes were heavy, we had to order thick milkshake straws online which were cut down and inserted into the bottom two cakes to help support the shot glasses.

Assembly was left until the big day, just before the cake was cut. It wasn't perfectly straight, and in photos it looks worse than in reality (camera angles can be so unkind), but nobody minded, and most importantly the bride and groom were happy with it.  I nearly missed the cake cutting, being in the middle of a conversation with my uncle in the pantry, and everyone had to shout my name to find me!!  All was well in the end though. I was most impressed when the whole bottom tier was eaten on the wedding day; but then, this IS my family we are talking about! It was a bit crumbly due to the gluten free nature, but the taste and lack of dodgy tummies afterwards in those susceptible more than made up for it.

Thank you for reading.  Hopefully more soon.

Caroline.