The Real Reason Dinosaurs Went Extinct

Because they are so delicious!

Delicious dinosaur English muffins

Yes, those are English muffins made in the shape of dinosaurs, using cookie cutters. They were delicious. They looked awesome. Most of them were missing legs, heads, or other assorted appendages (before we even took any bites, none the less!). We ate them a few ways:

Delicious as (kind of) eggs florentine!

Delicious coated in mashed dinosaur organs (strawberry flavoured)

The recipe was from Artisan Breads Everyday - yet another cold fermenting dough, and containing no sourdough starter. It was prepped on a Thursday when I woke up and cooked on a Saturday. This was the first enriched bread I've made - that is, one consisting of more than flour, yeast, and water. Much of the liquid in the cold fermented dough was milk, into which honey and olive oil were dissolved. Added to this were the standard bread ingredients, mixed by hand and neither kneaded nor stretch-and-folded, but simply refrigerated for two nights.

The morning of baking, the dough got the standard rising period followed by folding in warm water and baking soda to make it rise even more (it bubbled slightly, in fact). Sadly, the dough was not as runny as envisioned and it didn't properly fill the molds. You can see below what they looked like cooking - note the dusting of cornmeal everywhere, to add both texture and prevent everything from getting stuck. These dinosaurs popped right out of the molds - the only casualty was a velociraptor head.

The cooking process, including not-quite-filled cookie cutters.

This worked not as well as hoped, but better than expected. There were a few sad T-Rex and velociraptor molds made, but they had too many skinny limbs and extensions to turn out given the somewhat gelatinous dough. Having English muffin fights should become a part of a complete breakfast.