English Muffins (aka The Reason I Got Up This Morning)

I'm planning on making a couple of things in the next few days, but after looking through a bunch of food blogs yesterday, I absolutely had to make something ASAP. Deciding that a breakfast food was most practical, I settled on the English Muffins recipe that I found at Rosa's Yummy Yums.

I didn't modify the recipe at all, so I'm not going to re-post it here. But I do have a few notes to share.

Very simple ingredients all lined up

Yeast on its way to happy poofy-ness

Kneaded dough ready to rise

Okay, so the problems started around the time I took that last photo. Well, actually a little bit before: Readers, I want you to promise me that if you make this recipe, and you have a stand mixer, you will use it. That's all I'm gonna say.

Anyway. My mama requested that I make half the batch with cranberries, and I thought I could also add some cinnamon and sugar, since the original recipe isn't sweet at all. What I should have done was divide the dough while it was still very wet and add the sugar and cinnamon then. What I did was get the dough to the desired consistency (or close to it - it was still a little too wet when I kneaded it), then try to knead in the cinnamon and sugar. Not intelligent. It worked well with the cranberries later, though.

The second mistake was that, knowing full-well that I tend to roll dough out too thin, I dusted the work surface with corn meal as per the instructions. Should have used flour, since I ended up having to fold the dough over to make it thicker. Having corn meal in the muffins wasn't unpleasant, but it might have been part of the reason they were too dense in the end.

They definitely look pretty. But as my mom noted, they don't have the little nooks and crannies that they should when you cut them open. This could be due to over-kneading the dough or over-mixing it in the beginning.

So. Would I make these again? Definitely. Despite consistency issues, they taste great, especially the cranberry ones. I toasted both and made a sandwich out of the plain one with seared ham and cheddar cheese. Too lazy for egg this morning.

A bientot!

Kristina