The leaning tower of pikelets

Do you know what a pikelet is? If you answered "a baby pike", you may well be right - I've got no idea to be honest. 

But of course, if you said "a baby crumpet", you'd be spot on, for that is just what they are - think of the beautiful offspring of an illicit tryst between a crumpet and a drop scone, and you have a pikelet.

For some reason, I think of them as a northern English foodstuff - you don't tend to find them in supermarkets in London and the South East, but during my few years in Sheffield, they were more than plentiful. 

I stumbled across a recipe for parsley pikelets in a folder of recipes-I-meant-to-cook-one-day-but-have-since-forgotten about and decided to revisit this most interesting of baked goods.

I used the Dan Lepard recipe from The Guardian (in digging out that link, I noticed I must have put the recipe aside in 2008 and forgotten it til now. Oh dear.) I swapped the egg Lepard uses for a tablespoon of olive oil and an extra teaspoon of baking powder. 

Other substitutions: the batter seemed a bit thin, so I added a couple of extra handfuls of flour, and I ended up using wholemeal rather than white. That wasn't a culinary decision, just the result what was in my cupboard!  

And quite clearly and for obvious reasons, I didn't use the bacon either. Instead, Linda McCartneys sausages were called into action. A breakfast of champions, indeed.

The end result is, as you see below, the leaning tower of pikelets. It took me a while to get the quantities right to produce the crumpet-like bubbles on the surface, which is why the pikelets are stacked up like that - all the duff ones are hidden underneath!