Luke Alexander

This is my first attempt at making crumpets from scratch at home.  While not entirely successful (the crumpets didn’t taste very nice), I have however resolved to record for posterity my first attempt here.  That way, when I am a world-renowned crumpet chef (chef du crûmpé),  my fans and inevitable imitators will have some small token of encouragement, and something they can print out for me to autograph.

This recipe is primarily based on Delia Smith’s recipe, with some of my own modifications – notably the addition of a healthy element of gin to the process.

Preparation

First, buy some crumpet rings.  Or I should say, egg poaching rings.  It seems that amongst the crumpeteratti there is a tradition of starting crumpet recipes by bemoaning the demise of the dedicated crumpet ring.  Lacking the requisite experience and grey hairs, however, I shall merely direct you to your favourite search engine for further elucidation and merriment concerning this learned and diverting discussion.

Once you have bought your barely-suitable egg rings, return to your living space and prepare to take your first steps towards becoming a crumpet chef.  Congratulations!

For the preparation phase you will require:

• a good shirt and colourful cufflinks (or similar vestments for the ladies)
• recently-ironed trousers (jeans are fine, but they must not be distressed, either naturally or by manufacturer’s intention)
• suitable underwear
• approx 500ml of gin (Gordon’s will suffice – as always – but why not treat yourself to an artisan gin with some exotic botanicals.  Go for it.  Why not?)
• tonic water
• ice
• a lemon or lime, following your own preference as a guideline
• aromatic bitters (optional)

Once you have put your outside clothes to one side, replace them immediately (careful to avoid making yourself cold in the process) with your chosen crumpet-making outfit.  Congratulations!  You’re one step closer to the crumpet of your dreams.

Preliminaries

Next, repair to the kitchen with the other (non wearable) items above, and of course those ever-controversial egg-cum-crumpet rings  Slice the lemon or lime, squeeze a few drops of juice into a tall glass half-full of ice, pour in enough gin to cover the ice, and top up with tonic water.  Add aromatic bitters, optionally, as per your desire.

Sip your gin and tonic with pleasure.  Congratulations!  You are yet another step closer to the crumpet of your dreams.

At this stage you may find it politic to take a small break.  Watch some TV, speak to a friend, read a good book.  You cannot rush crumpets.

If you have access to a device for playing music in the area that you will be using as a kitchen, now is a perfect time to get your crumpeting playlist going.  For my first crumpet attempt, I used Chopin’s Mazurkas, which I found to be most in-fitting with the endeavour.  Your taste and judgement may, disappointingly, vary.

Sip your gin throughout, and if necessary refill your glass as above.  Once you are suitably fortified, stand boldly upright, stride into the kitchen and gather about you the following ingredients.  If you do not have these ingredients, it would have been helpful if you had bought them along with those hateful egg rings earlier.  Silly you.  Off you go, then.

• some flour (plain, a bag of)
• dried yeast in inconveniently oversized sachets
• butter (it is crucial that you fervently believe this is butter – merely doubting that it is not, is not appropriate)
• milk (your housemate’s milk is fine – after all, he’s the one who has cereal all the time so why should you replace it?)
• water
• caster sugar

Delia’s original recipe has some further details – specific quantities and so forth.  I trust that you will turn to her for these specificities. If you follow the spirit of crumpet making from this recipe and the strict details from hers, you will – at the least – be nicely drunk.  And who can blame you.  You are taking your first steps to becoming a crumpet chef.  Congratulations!

The crumpet

If you have never seen a crumpet before, or do not know what one is, now would be a perfect time to find out.  Surrounded as  you are at this stage by your ingredients, find a suitable surface to rest your laptop or handheld internet device and search for ‘crumpet‘.  Look closely at the images that return.  In a mere two hours time, you will have made between two and twelve of those.  Congratulations!  You are well on your way to the crumpet of your dreams.

Now, ensuring that your glass is well filled with life-giving gin, you can begin the crumpeting process.

The crumpeting process

First, take a small saucepan, place it on your hob, and turn it to a medium heat.  Put a decent whack of milk into the pan (about three times what you’d put into a bowl of cereal, or eight to nine times the amount you would use to tame a cup of tea that had been brewed too long).  Add a tad of water (conversion values from tads to millilitres and other new-fangled measures can be found online).

Heat until this liquid is moderately warm.  Delia suggests it be ‘hand hot’, and I found the best way to measure this was to test it with my hand.

Then, put the liquid into a bowl, and add one and a bit inconvenient sachets of yeast.  And a bit of sugar.  Say a builder’s tea amount?  I’m sure it doesn’t matter massively.

Leave the liquid for a bit, until it has a weird brown head of foam.  Yuk.

Then (or if you’re massively ambitious like Delia, at the same time) sift quite a lot of flour – about half a human head full – and a bit of salt into a bowl.  When the yeasty liquid is ready, make a little crater and pour it into the middle.

If all is going to plan, you will now have a bowl of increasingly soggy flour covered in yeasty, watery milk.  This is not as bad as it sounds.  In fact, it’s exactly right.  Congratulations!  You are now approximately half way towards the crumpet of your dreams.

Now cover your bowl of yeasty muck with a tea towel, place somewhere relatively warm and leave it  be.  You will need to leave it be for approximately 45 minutes – coincidentally the length of a network TV episode in the US. So refill your glass of gin, find somewhere warm for yourself, and watch one.  For premium contextual relevance, I recommend an episode of John Adams (although not referenced directly, it has to be assumed that crumpets played their part in the colony’s separation), or two episodes of a sit com like Friends or How I Met Your Mother during which a character makes food (either disastrously or non-disastrously, to taste).

The crumpeting process, continued

Some time after setting the bowl of muck aside, it will be ready to serve.  If you have been drinking your gin at the appropriate rate throughout, it should be around the time at which you are starting to have trouble focusing on the TV.  If in doubt, try to stand up.  If it takes you at least one and a half attempts, you are ready to return to your crumpeting.

Return to your crumpeting.  Look at the bowl of muck.  Has it risen to a fluffy, airy, foamy batter?  It has?  Congratulations!  You are one step closer to the crumpet of your dreams.

Now that your crumpet mixture is ready, get a flat-bottomed frying pan, greased heavily with butter, and your pitifully inadequate egg rings, and grease them too.  By the end of this process, everything should be pretty well greased.

Great.

Now, put the frying pan and those sordidly inappropriate rings on a medium heat.  You can work out what this would be for your own cooker by taking the highest number shown on the dial and dividing it by two.  In some cases, it may be necessary to add or subtract half a unit to get the nearest round number.

Wait a little while, sipping your gin thoughtfully.

Once your greasy tools are sufficiently warmed, it’s time to take your final crumpet-making steps.  Congratulations!  You’re now very few steps away from the crumpet of your dreams.

Boldly take a tablespoon / other big spoon in your hand and thrust it into the mixture.  If the mixture is right, and you are sufficiently drunk on gin, this should feel roughly like slaying a dragon.  Congratulations!  You hero.

Using the spoon, move a portion of the mixture into the middle of one of your rings.  Repeat for however many rings you might have.

Open your mouth, and speak these words in an expectant whisper: “My crumpet is on its way”.

Your crumpet is on its way.

About five minutes / half a glass of gin later, the crumpet should have risen slightly in the ring, and will have those little holes in the top like it does in the shop.  Now remove the ring, flip it over and cook it for a pretty short time on the other side.

Remove from the heat.

Place it on a plate.

Pick the plate up.

Congratulations!  You are now holding a plate on which rests the crumpet of your dreams!

Repeat.

Eat.

A lot can change in ten years.

For example, ten years ago I would have rejected that sentence as the worst kind of truism.  Now, on the other hand, it’s a friendly, familiar cliche that does just the job I want it to.

Because a lot has changed in the last ten years.  On a global scale, sure, but also on the microcosmic and individual scales of our daily lives; of the lives of everyone across the planet.

Now, the past tense of change (if we dispense with linguistic formalities) is, or should be, experience.  When your foot slips, or your heart palpitates, or your stomach churns: at the same time, neurons are firing, linking and settling like leaves resettling from a gust of wind.  Or that’s how I imagine it anyway.

My point?  Glad you asked. And in reply, let me say this: that I learned a lot in 2009.  And let me show you this: my list of five things that I learned.

1. Writing is really easy

I wrote a novel in November.  As I put my 50,000th word on the page, three hours before the final deadline, I surprised myself not by my relief in having pushed through the intense challenge of the previous thirty days, but in how enjoyable and pleasant they had been.  Writing is easy.  You just have to do it.  Then you’ve done it, and it’s written.

2. Writing is really hard

Approximately two minutes after that epiphanic realisation, I remembered how individually painful each word had been, and once the words had come, how terrifying it had been to move on from each sentence.  I don’t think there was a single paragraph in that novel I was happy with – and few I was capable of reading without wincing.  My biggest success throughout the project wasn’t writing a novel – nor was it even finding the time to do so – but in forcing myself not to tear the whole thing up and start again every time I opened the document.

3. I don’t belong in the Middle East

This learning may well belong to 2007, or to 2008.  But 2009 – as the year I returned to the UK from Abu Dhabi – was the year I became entirely certain that it was true.

Which isn’t to say that I dislike life in the UAE.  Some great friends, incredible opportunities and challenging work gave me an experience I would never regret… but at the end of the day, more than anything I found myself longing for country pubs, brisk walks in the cold, public transport, old friends.

I’m sure I’ll return to the UAE from time to time when work takes me – but it was a nice realisation that, though I had proven capable of handling living in a foreign country, the expat life wasn’t really for me.

4. I don’t read enough

I think there is a massive chunk of – at least British – society who go around thinking they are regular readers / gamers / film watchers / theatregoers / musicians, but who on reflection can’t really back it up.

For most of 2009 I definitely fell into that category – on almost every account.  Despite working for a gaming company and obsessively shuffling my books around bookcases, during most of the year I didn’t really have a game or a book on the go at any time.

Inspiration doesn’t just promote creativity, it makes you happy, sociable, interesting…  so I’m on the watch out for similar slips into the creative doldrums during 2010.

5. We are in the middle of a modern renaissance

Once I was reading, gaming and partaking of the moving image once more, I realised that the last few years has seen some incredible creative output.

The Edinburgh Festival this year was honestly the best I’ve ever seen it – perhaps an innacurate barometer, but it supported the rest of my experiences throughout the year, which saw superb TV, film, art, gaming…  enough to warrant a second post, I feel, on the cultural highlights of the year.

And certainly enough to make me extremely excited to see what 2010 has in store.

Much to my surprise, I managed to complete my NaNoWriMo novel, clinching the 50,000th word of the month some time after 9pm on 30 November 2009.

What to do next, I’m not sure.  But I think that come 2010 I will at the very least fill in the gaps, tidy it up and turn it into something I’m happy for my long-suffering friends and family to read.

I’m way, way behind on my NaNoWriMo effort.  I should be at around 30,000 – but I’ve barely managed 20,000.  Tomorrow will be the make or break point… we’ll see.

To encourage myself (or just to waste some time), I’ve put my text through an analyser at http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp.

My novel has a readability level of 10.25.  That’s great! Puts me between Newsweek and the New York Times (which I guess is a UK level of something like the Guardian’s wordier bits).

Also starting a new project with a friend at http://www.99wds.com.  More details later.

Some more stats:

I did, perhaps, underestimate the consequences of taking four days holiday to Barcelona in the middle of NaNoWriMo.

At the worst, I thought that taking a four day break (at 1,667 words a day) out of the 50,000 word writing month would delay me, well, 6,668 words.

But one delay quickly leads to more delays, and now I find myself a slightly more worrying 12,484 words behind where I should be at the half way point.  So rather than being at the half-way point, I’m merely half-way to half-way.

Can I make it to 25,000 today?  Perhaps.  Unlikely.  Possibly.

In any rate, it will only happen at all if I start writing.  Which I guess I will do… now.

Update: made it to the disappointing but pleasingly round number of 15,070 words.  So, 10,000 words off of my goal… but with 14 days to go I’m hoping I can make some of that up.  At this rate I need 2,500 a day not to drop behind.