Oh Crumpets!!!

Yes, I know. Yet again I've been gone from the blogging world for far too long. I didn't even log on to see the comment Justine left me until it was almost a month later! lol Sorry Justine; and you're right!

I had an...experience today that made me feel the need to blog. WARNING: This post is rather long. Sorry! :) Here you go:

Today, at Jerrica's preschool, it was International Feast Day! Instead of having a Thanksgiving-style dinner, they asked each family to prepare a dish from their country of origin. At first I hadn't planned on participating, but this morning I started thinking it might be fun.

Being that my family and Marc's family are both originally from England, I only felt it proper to make tea and crumpets! (Well, that and I had all of the ingredients on hand except the tea.) The recipe seemed easy enough so away I went. Since the dough/batter mixture needed to rise for about an hour, I got it all setup by noon and put it in the oven to rise. (I like to turn the oven on for just a minute or two and then turn it off so my stuff has a nice, warm place to rise.) I figured I'd have just enough time to take Jerrica to school, run by the store, and cook up the batter by 2:45 for the party. Pretty ambitious, right?

One of the unique things about crumpets is that, although they're kind of like biscuits, you don't bake them in the oven. Instead, you are suppose to use a griddle and crumpet rings—which are really just fancy cookie cutters—where you pour the batter and grill them up. Well, apparently finding circular, metal cookie cutters is a little more challenging than I thought it was going to be. So after a trip to Walmart and the dollar store, I decided to give up on trying to find the stupid things and figured I'd just make them out of aluminum foil. It was now 1:20.

The panic finally set in as I was driving home and realized that today was early release day for Ally, and I had to go pick her up from school at 1:50. I rushed home, pulled the griddle out to preheat, and started making crumpet rings out of aluminum foil. (By the way, those actually turned out perfectly and ended up working very well!)

My batter still needed to rise one more time after I put the last ingredient in. So I turn the oven on, threw in the last ingredient, tossed a towel over the bowl, popped it in the oven, and ran out the door to get Ally from school.

Yeah. Did you notice one step that was missing back there? Yes, I forgot to turn the oven off.

Luckily the house didn't burn down! By the time I got home, the towel was turning brown and half of the batter had cooked to the side of the bowl, but all was not lost! The center of the batter was still good, so after burning my hands taking the hot bowl out of the oven, I started grilling me some crumpets.

Finally, after some overfilling of the crumpet rings, the use of a frying pan as a lid on my griddle, and cutting each crumpet in half to grill them and make sure that the middle was cooked...I was done!

And not a moment too soon because it was 2:35 which left me about 10 minutes to make the 15 minutes drive to the preschool. I ended up being a few minutes late but let's be honest, when am I not a few minutes late?

Miraculously, the crumpets were a huge success! With the butter and jam that I had provided, they were really pretty good and disappeared by the end of the feast. I even had one lady ask me for my recipe! =O Overall, the feast was really yummy and really fun. :)

So the lesson in all of this? Never...ever...ever make a first attempt at a new recipe unless you have plenty of time to screw up about a billion times! ;)

I forgot to take a picture of the whole platter with the butter and jam and everything,
but here's a picture of one of the crumpets.