Toad in the Hole

As part of my British Life and Culture class our teacher, not professor...teacher, gave us the task of making a British dish in our flat groups.  He told us that him and his wife would come by and try each groups dish and then award prizes to the winning group.  Instantly, being Americans, each flat went into competition mode thinking of bigger and better ways to out due the other flats.  The British dish each group had to make was 'Toad in the Hole', a breakfast dish consisting of sausage and breading.  

This is what my flat did to beat out the competition.  First we cleaned up our flat.  Yes, even though we are girls it NEEDED cleaning.  Then, we set up the table; we took off one of our bed sheets to fold in half as a tablecloth, set the table, bought flowers for a centerpiece, and even framed a note for our teacher that said, "Welcome to the taste of London...on behalf of flat 40 we thank you for visiting!" (clever, huh?).  Oh, we also had symphony music playing on someone's laptop as background music.  We are classy.

To prepare the dish we first had to make the breading the night before our teacher came.  The recipie called for us to sift the flour.  Unfortunately we don't have that many cooking utensils in our flat so we had to use a tea strainer as a sifter, we were very dedicated to this dish!  Then, after we sifted 6 cups of flour through a small tea strainer we had to add eggs and milk to the batter.  After all that we let the batter sit for a night.

The next day before our teacher came we then cooked the sausages, put the batter in and cooked our Toad in the Hole.  We also made some additional items to our dinner.  I prepared a dessert tray consisting of Victoria Sponge Cake (white sponge cake with creme and raspberry jelly in between the 2 layers-it's delicious), chocolate wafers and Jaffa cakes (not as good as they sound - they are wafers with orange gel covered in chocolate coating, they'd be better without the orange gel).  We also decided that when our teacher came we were going to serve them mushy peas, a British veggie, with the Toad in the Hole.  Mushy peas, though they sound gross, are actually good! I really like them, better than regular peas!  

Anyways, we had the whole thing all planned.  We all were super prepared for our teacher to come, we were going to pull out their chairs, offer them tea, then offer them merlot (which they did take our offer on, we even had it chilled in our freezer but found out later merlot doesn't need to be chilled. oops!)  and make conversation with them about the other groups.  We all were really nervous before they came, we just wanted to win soooo badly! 

Well when they did end up coming we had a great time!  Like I said before they didn't want tea but they took up our merlot offer.  They even said our Toad in the Hole was good but the mushy peas...yes, those are suppose to be served HOT not cold.  We had them in the fridge before they came thinking they needed to be served cold.  Other than that we had a hilarious time talking to our teacher and his wife and learning about British food.

After the festivities our teacher than awarded us prizes.  Unfortunately we didn't win first place =[ Our teacher said it was a close call between us and the flat that won first place BUT we did win the better prize.  Our teacher gave us the designated 'rowdy group' prize: a 4-pack of Kenttish Ale! Yeay! And the first place winners only got 1 bottle of wine.  Lame! Haha!  Anyways we had a great time and enjoyed making and serving the meal. The pictures below show the whole process.

Toad in the Hole Pictures...

Here's the recipe if you'd like to make it yourself:

8 sausages

4 tablespoons cooking oil

For the batter:

6 oz plain flour

pinch of salt

1 egg

1 egg white

8-10 fluid oz. milk

(The batter can be made up to 24 hours in advance)

1. Sift the flour with the salt.  Add the egg and egg white to flour. 

2. Whisk in 8 fl. oz. of milk. To check consistency of batter lift spoon in and out of batter; the batter should hold and coat back of spoon.

3. Let batter rest for at least 30 minutes.

4. Be sure to cook sausages before baking the dish.

5. In a roasting tin, put sausages in roasting tin.  Pour in batter up to three quarters of the way up the sausage. 

6. Place in oven at 220 degrees C or 425 degrees F and bake for 35-45 minutes.

7. After the toads are ready, get your HP (brown) sauce and eat.  Yum!  Don't forget the tea =]

PS- Toad in the Hole is best served with Onion Gravy or fried onions on top.