Winter delights: crumpets

This weekend's Guardian magazine has a great recipe for crumpets - I haven't tried Hugh's recipe but I have made crumpets and can confirm that it's ridiculously easy to make something that you can impress your friends with.

Don't be put off if you haven't got crumpet rings - all you need to do is take a small baked bean tin and use your tin opener to take the top and the bottom off. It works best if you've got one of those old fashioned tin openers which take the rim off too. Wash off the label and voila! Just mind your fingers when you're greasing it, or go the whole hog and smooth off the sharp edges with a file.

Crumpets are definitely top of my list of British tea-time treats, well above muffins, pikelets, potato cakes and all those various other regional variations (although they would probably come equal to toasted teacakes if we were to include sweet as well as savoury!). But it's always difficult to decide what to put on them. I think my order of preference goes as follows: butter only, butter and Vegemite, butter and honey, butter and jam (the last two are ok without the butter if you are watching the calories).

Where I am from in Derbyshire we have local delicacy called Derbyshire oatcakes, nothing like Scottish oatcakes, instead they are more like thick pancakes. We never had them at home when I was a kid, since neither of my parents is from Derbyshire, and I only discovered them in the last few years. You can buy them cold in packs of five off the market in Chesterfield, they are good fried in butter with breakfast, rolled up and stuffed and used like cannelloni, or heated up with sweet toppings.

Another recipe I particularly like is for Parsley Pikelets, also in the Guardian weekend magazine about a year ago. I usually make a batch of these and freeze the ones that don't get eaten, they can then be defrosted overnight and fried in butter for breakfast with scrambled eggs the next day.