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‘It was like cherry Armageddon’ – trying out a frumpet for the first time

Forget the great British fry-up, granary toast and marmalade or a bowl of granola for your breakfast.

They are old hat – didn’t you know a frumpet is where it’s at? I have to admit to being ignorant of this alternative brekkie offering until a couple of weeks ago.

It was thanks to the free food magazine that I like to pick up in Tesco for meal inspiration that I was introduced to the supermarket’s “treat of the week” – chocolate cherry frumpets. It has to be said the emphasis needs to be on “treat” here.

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The Tesco traffic-light labelling on this recipe flags mainly amber nutritional tags, plus a red for the sugar content (oddly, the printed version shows amber for its salt content but green on the online version), but it is described as an “indulgent” cross between fluffy crumpets and French toast (hence the name frumpet), so it’s not intended for daily consumption. The ingredients were easy to source and the instructions were simple to follow.

It did prove a bit of a faff, however. The first thing to do was pit the cherries – amazingly, a garlic press I have had gathering dust in a drawer has a cherry pitter incorporated in its handle, I discovered, and, while this proved effective at its job it was like cherry Armageddon in my kitchen.



How Deborah Hall's version of chocolate cherry frumpets sized up against the Tesco magazine recipe
How Deborah Hall’s version of chocolate cherry frumpets sized up against the Tesco magazine recipe

Dark-red juice spattered the worktops, the storage jars, the wall tiles and my skirt. Half of the de-stoned cherries went into a pan with some sugar (I reduced the amount given, slightly) and a splash of water, to be heated until “saucy and slightly softened”.

In the meantime I set to dunking the crumpets in a mix of milk, beaten egg and cocoa powder and sugar (again I reduced the latter slightly) and even though I left them longer than the one-minute each side that the recipe suggested, they still didn’t soak up all of the liquid, to that was a bit of waste (I guess I could have made a small portion of sweet, chocolate scrambled egg with it, but that didn’t appeal).

I’d left my cooked cherries cooling and the “saucy” bit had set on the bottom of the pan. I fried the frumpets in unsalted butter for the said two-to-three minutes and dished them up with some Greek-style yogurt, the cherries and a scraping of their sauce, now like jam, the remaining fresh cherries and a grating of dark chocolate over the top.

To say I’m used to a very simple treatment of crumpets – double-toasted so they are really crispy and lathered in butter – the softer and somewhat soggier frumpets were surprisingly good and you could make out the cocoa flavour which went really well with the sweet cherries and sharp tang of the yogurt. By the time I’d finished faffing, my breakfast had turned into brunch and this substantial dish was filling enough to stave off any hunger pangs for hours.

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