Bluestocking - the second leg

[ErrolTheDragon]

The original premises are getting crowded, we need to expand.

Welcome all women, and well behaved animals.

Winner winner chicken dinner!
Fantastic fireworks. 🎆

Here you are....

Ooh! Aah!

I think I fancy a wallow in a warm pool in the sanctuary ... wondering what the ideal drink is for that?

Champagne 🍾 I think the Foxphobe has half a bottle left.

Has anyone seen the I’m a transgender woman - AMA thread?

Ive had a bit of fun on there.

I read a bit of the first reply ... fuck that.
Better step away before I overheat the water, I've come here to relax.

That thread has been hidden...just how much fun did you have @SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius ? 😁

Tbf, it was an AMA no promises regarding answers, typical TA.

It's a lovely morning, almost feels a little autumnal for Ausgust though. I'm going to have tea and pikelets while watching the birds on the feeders.

Ohhh dear - maybe I broke the poor, sweetly feminine chap!

I do have some News - ds1’s lovely wife is expecting again - they already have one dd - and it is twins!! They are somewhat in shock, and starting to try to work out how they deal with two babies and a toddler.

My knitting needles will be running hot.

Pikelets! Pikelets!!
Are you from round Nottingham way?

I know no one having a baby that I can knit for. A nice young couple up the road will have a other one at some point and I'll be right there with a little cardigan....

A bit further North, closer to Manchester. Are they a Nottingham thing? I thought of them as generally Northern. I've not been to a Betty's in a while but I had freshly made pikelets in the one that was in York.

They have things in Australia they call pikelets but they're not yeasted, they're more like an American pancakes I think. I've never been to Oz but Andy Cooks on YouTube made them.

I love many of the things on the batter spectrum though. Add a little bit more of this, take away a bit of that or throw the other in.

There was a cookbook with the framing device of how recipes related to one another, you start with a simple pancake batter, refineand evolve eventually you have a croissant via Yorkshire pudding, sponge cake and short crust pastry. I never even saw the book, I just read a review and it sounded fascinating.

We always called them "pikelets" when I was a kid, and mist people just look blankly at me if I say the word now!

I can get on board with batter...but not a croissant made of batter. All kinds of wrong!

Ahem.

Welsh cakes.

As you were.

A croissant made of batter (I'm not sure that's even possible) would be rank. I bet there's a chippy somewhere possibly in Scotland that would batter and deep-fry one.

But starting with a simple batter you could assemble a list of recipes, each only slightly changed, that eventually evolve to become the recipe for something like a croissant.

There was a shop in Solva that sold traditional Welsh cakes and Welsh cakes with all sorts of nonstandard ingredients including iirc some savoury ones.

I thought pikelets was more northern too, more Yorkshire way than Midlands.

I missed most of that fast moving thread, I had to placemark when it was in the 900s in case I couldn't find it again.

S-i-l makes people shaped American style pancakes (drop scones?). If you ask for a boy pancake you get one with nuts.

My father was a Yorkshireman, he used the word pikelet, sometimes to refer to a crumpet.

I was mystified as a child how they got the vertical holes into crumpets, I imagined there must be a machine which stamped them in before cooking.

How do they get the hole's in please.

We call then pikelets or crumpets, from the midlands.

Many years ago I had a lovely friend who did R&D on crumpet batters, she was a rheologist called Flo.

I always read R&D as rhythm and development.

I recently made the magical and life-enhancing discovery that I can make pikelets myself from spelt (neither they nor crumpets are available anywhere near me in Ireland, even if I could eat wheat which I can't) - they need yeast and baking powder, and are dead easy to make (and eat).

@DeanElderberry can you give us a recipient pleeeeease

I didn't even use a recipe - started with flour, added a bit of dried yeast and ditto baking powder, pinch of salt, enough water to make a stiffish batter and left it all to sit for 2 or 3 hours - then cooked spoonfuls on the pan.

Sorry to be vague, but it was that easy.