12 Grain English Muffins

Today is exactly one year since I made my blog not by invitation only and opened it up to the world, beyond just my close family and friends. It was the greatest decision I ever made to just dive into the blog, really not having any idea where it would take me. This will be my 84th post since first begining on June 1st 2010. I honestly can't say whether I thought I would still be blogging about my food 'experiments' a year later, but I can tell you there is no end in sight. This blog affords me the opportunity to share my experiences in the kitchen (and sometimes in the garden). I hardly get in culinary ruts because I am constantly looking for something new to do in the kitchen and then share it with all of you. Thank you everyone for reading and thank you to all those who inspire me every day!

As I have shared before, I have been baking my own bread. It has been probably a month since I have purchased a pre-sliced bagged loaf of bread. While baking bread is slightly time and labour intensive, it is definitely worth it. While I have yet to bake a perfectly sliceable loaf, I have not given up. In the meantime, I wanted to try baking other bread products that I love. Up there on the list are english muffins. I had saved a few recipes that I had found online and finally had some time to make them today. They have a lot of rising time involved but are fairly easy to make.

I followed this recipe on A Full Measure of Happiness. I made a couple changes: I made regular sized muffins (it made 15 muffins), used 12 grain flour instead of whole wheat flour, used sucanat instead of sugar, used half the salt, and soy milk instead of cows milk. These modifications seemed to work okay.. The general procedure for making english muffins is to make the dough, let it rise, roll in out, shape some muffins, let it rise and then bake. I have also seen some recipes for doing them in the pan, but I think I will stick to the oven.

They turned out wonderful! They didn't have as many holes in them as the store bought ones, but they have a much better flavour.

I was surprised with how many muffins the recipe made and will be freezing most of them. I bet if I did a cost analysis on this they would be more inexpensive than the store bought variety. I will definitely be playing around with this recipe in the future, for cinnamon raisin, blueberry, and even cheese english muffins. I'd also like to try and get them a bit more fluffy, maybe with rolling them out thinner and letting them rise more. I tend to be a little impatient, especially when the dough becomes deliciously fragrant.