(English) muffins aren’t made in the oven. Or at least, the ones you buy in supermarkets might be, but they shouldn’t be. They’re cooked on a griddle.
I don’t have a griddle, so when I make them, I use a big heavy frying pan with a little bit of lard. You cook them for a few minutes on each side. Like this.
Maybe it’s an age thing. I’ve asked a few friends (UK, in our 20s), and we’ve all agreed that if we heard the word “muffin” with no context, we would assume it was referring to the cake.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an “English muffin” outside of the McDonalds breakfast menu. I’m not sure what makes them any different from any other type of bread roll.
I had no idea! And I’ve made quite a few breads, including naan, which is made just like that on the iron skillet. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl this weekend.
Well, if you walk through the supermarket with your eyes shut I guess you won’t see the muffins or see how they differ from bread rolls. Your ignorance notwithstanding, they are there on the shelves (and not particularly hard to find) and they do differ considerably.
We seem to be mixing up a couple of words in English here, with a couple of words in US English here, and to make it worse, US English has crept into UK English usage if you happen you be under a certain age.
The small round sweet cakelike things are called buns, not muffins - for English folk under 40 years old.
However buns can be used for lots of other baked goods, some are more bread based, and frequently but not always, have some sweet aspect to them.
Do you have any sort of evidence for that? I am English folk well over 40 (I presume that is what you meant) and I would never use “buns” to refer to the cake things that Americans (and British people too, now) call [unqualified] muffins. When I was a boy, I do not think we called them anything at all, because I do not remember such things existing in Britain. I think both the thing, and the word “muffin” for them, are relatively recent imports from America.
Although it is true that there are many types of buns in Britain, I do not think the word has ever stretched so far as to include things like [American] muffins, which differ greatly both in shape and texture from anything I would call a bun.
(To make things yet more complicated, Americans also have the word “bun” but use it rather differently from the British. Apart from “cinnamon buns”, Americans do not really seem to go in for the several types of sweet bun that the British do. However, they do commonly use the word “bun” to describe the unsweetened bread rolls in which they eat hamburgers and hotdogs. In British English, and abstracted from their American-aping use with hamburgers and hotdogs, these plain breads would not be buns at all, but rolls.)
I thought what you got was slapped.
Awesome book. Well worth a read is you want to see how far chemistry had gotten by 1820.
Reading it now.
That would be asking for “crumpet”, without the article.
Here in Toronto, crumpets and English muffins are displayed side-by-side in the bread section at my local Food Basics. I could never confuse the two either.
I LOVE soaking crumpets with butter and marmalade. It’s SOOOOOOOOOOOO good!
Ach, I got that slightly wrong, for any English person **OVER 40 ** then what you would call a cupcake, or US muffin is what we would call a bun
if you are from the North of England, then you might consume a ‘Fancy’
A fancy is frequently covered in sugar icing and usually quite small, just one or two bites will finish one off.
In between bun and fancy we have slightly fancy buns - such as butterfly buns
Of course you can make buns plain, currant, lemon vanilla or whatever you want, I believe you might call them cup cakes, however from what I have seen of US cupcakes, you seem to have much more icing and decoration, getting on for Fancy territory.
And as I said, I am an English person well over 40 (raised in the south but also lived many years in the north) and I would not call either a cupcake or a US muffin (which are similar in shape, but not in taste or texture) a bun.
These are buns (except that some are buns in teh American sense, i.e., bread rolls suitable for containing a hamburger. British buns are sweeter, chewier, and often contain fruit.)
Well, I have never heard things like that called buns. They are cakes, and have a quite different texture to a bun (crumbly rather than chewy). I think, in British English, I would call them fairy cakes or cupcakes (which is a British as well as an American term). Here is what UK Google thinks are cup cakes. All the ones I see there are pretty fancied up, but they would still count as cup cakes (in the US or UK) if they had no icing or decoration at all. It is the texture and shape that make them a cupcake.
Wait. Y’all have your very own google? The real one isn’t good enough?
Everyone has their own Google (unfortunately).
Yes. If you search for “favorite cupcake flavor” it returns zero hits.
