English Muffins

The technical challenge from Great British Bake Off Week 2 was English Muffins. I found the recipe and got to making these. I haven't made muffins before but since I'm a regular bread baker I thought it looked fairly similar and I had all the ingredients. The recipe can be found here. 

The recipe basically requires adding everything in a bowl and mixing it together until you get a dough. You are supposed to turn the mixture out on to a floured surface and need it untill smooth and soft. This is the step I found the most challenging. From watching the program there were people saying you shouldn't add too much flour and just keep kneading until it all comes together. Well my dough was so sticky that it just stuck to my hands and surface, I had put some flour down but this was quickly absorbed by the dough. After around 10 minutes my dough was lovely and smooth and it was certainly a different texture, however, it was still stuck everywhere. In the end I decided to use flour to pull it off everything and make the dough more solid so I could form it into a ball and put in a bowl. In hindsight I probably could have just put the sticky dough in the bowl and pulled it off everything but it was what I did at the time. 

Before it had proving time

The dough is left to double in size, around 1 hour, and then turned out onto a surface and rolled to 1.5cm thick. I found this tricky because the dough kept shrinking back when I rolled it. I had to be quite persistent and then the first time I underestimated what 1.5cm was and had to start again. Eventually I got it to the right thickness, left it to rest for 15 minutes and cut out the muffins using the cutter. I left the muffins for 30minutes to prove. 

Cut and ready to prove

I cooked my muffins in a frying pan so I heated that up first. I made the mistake of not reading the recipe and had my pan on a high heat and not a low one. This meant that when I added the muffins they got burnt on one side as I was trying to cook them through. I realised and turned it down and then flipped them over. It's really difficult to know when these are cooked so I left them on there as long as I could and just guessed. 

Burnt on one side

The verdict: If this was my technical challenge I certainly wouldn't have come first, I made so many stupid mistakes throughout the recipe despite having all the details in front of me. The muffins were cooked through to the centre and I thought they tasted quite nice, if you ignore the burnt side. Overall it's not something I'd particularly like to make again, I may do if required but I'm not inspired by having done it once. I would give my muffins 5/10 and the recipe could have done with a little more help on certain issues, like the dough. 

Cooked all the way through