Crumpets of Various Shapes

When Anthony and I were visiting his grandpa one time, he asked us where the tea and crumpets were.  Well, we never intended to bring him crumpets (who knows what crumpets are anyway?).  But just the next day, we went into a Trader Joes and saw some on the shelf.  We got them just for fun and had tea and crumpets the next time we visited his grandpa.  Crumpets have some similarity to English muffins (which I really like) and I very much enjoyed them. 

Later, I was visiting a friend and we decided to bake something together.  We searched for crumpet recipes and found one that tasted very good (except that it wasn't as clear as it could have been).  The recipe came from here.  The recipe mentioned adding lots of extra water, but didn't describe how much, so we edited the recipe as follows to make it a more proper consistency:

4 c. flour mixed with

            1 tsp. salt

2 c. warm milk mixed with

            1 tsp. sugar

            1 heaping tsp. yeast

            1 c. water

Mix everything together and beat for 5-10 minutes.  Let it rise until double. 

Dissolve 1/4 tsp. baking soda in 1/2 c. warm water and add to the dough.  Add about another 1 c. warm water to make it like pancake batter.

Pour batter into greased rings on a skillet.  When they're very bubbly, flip them over to finish the cooking from the other side.

Here's our batter when it was too thick (before we added extra water):

We tried two different things.  Since we didn't have a bunch of round cookie cutters or little metal things to make crumpet-shaped crumpets, we used some other random cookie cutters.  You can see some of them below: a stegosaurus, a rocket, a star, a holly leaf, and a heart.  We actually cooked these when the batter was too thick, but they still tasted great.

And then, since the recipe made a whole lot of crumpets, we didn't want to wash all of the cookie cutters over and over and ended up just making free-form crumpets: