Muffins but the savoury kind

I've been meaning to have a go at English Muffins since I saw them as the technical challenge on GBBO and finally got around to making them. I decided to therefore use the GBBO recipe which is as follows:

300g strong white bread flour

6g fast-action yeast

6g salt

15g caster sugar 

15g softened butter, cut into small pieces

1 medium free-range egg

170ml milk 

Semolina plus extra for dusting

Tip the flour into a large mixing bowl. The recipe states you should knead by hand but I decided to go with the dough hook as I knew it was a wet dough. 

Sprinkle the yeast on one side of the flour and the salt into the other side of the flour. Add the sugar, butter, egg and milk, then mix all the ingredients together to form a soft dough then let the hook knead for 10 minutes, or until soft, smooth and stretchy. The dough was fair too wet for my liking so I did what you're not supposed to do and added a bit more flour.

Lightly grease a large bowl with oil. Place the dough in the oiled bowl, cover and leave to prove for about one hour, or until doubled in size. By this point mine had hardly risen. No idea what I'd done so maybe actually do do them by hand!

Dust the work surface with a mixture of the semolina and flour. Tip the dough out onto the work surface and roll out to about 2.5cm thick.

Lightly dust two baking trays with half of the semolina

Using a 9cm straight-sided cutter, cut out eight muffins. I didn't measure my cutter, just used what I thought looked right. 

Place four muffins, evenly spaced apart on each of the dusted baking trays. Dust the remaining semolina or polenta over the top of the muffins and leave to prove for another 30 minutes. They did change a little bit by this point.

Now......the recipe then goes like this:

Preheat a hot plate or a heavy-based frying pan on the hob to a very low heat. Griddle the muffins for approximately 5-6 minutes, then flip over and griddle for another 5-6 minutes on the other side.

I have a hot plate but could only fit two on so did two in a frying pan too. I only had 4 muffins out of my dough because it just didn't rise. You're supposed to get 8. After 6 minutes each side they still felt doughy in the middle so I popped them into the oven to bake a bit. 

Ideally you're supposed to leave them to cool then slice and toast but we ate ours straight away with butter, bacon and poached eggs. They were nice and turned out ok. I would hope to get the requisite number out of the dough next time, maybe make them a tad smaller and roll the dough a bit thinner as I think they were too thick. So not a total fail. Just a small one maybe.

I certainly wouldn't have done well in that technical bake off!

Mine's on the left. Shop bought on the right