Making English Muffins

Today I decided to bake English muffins. Adam and I have been wanting to make homemade English muffins for a while. He found out that the round muffin tins are SO expensive, but when he mentioned it to my mother (the woman with EVERYTHING), she pulled out 2 boxes of these:
She had bought them at a thrift store for 50¢ a box! That's a lot better than $6.00 per round tin (yikes!) She gave them to us, because that's just how she is :)
I followed the recipe on the box because I honestly couldn't find many recipes in cookbooks. This recipe calls for BAKING the muffins, which sounded interesting. Next time, Adam wants to try a recipe that pan-fries the muffins. That may be even better.

The dough was very moist, but not quite a liquid. I believe that the pan-fried recipe actually produces a liquid, which is poured into the muffin tins while they sit on the skillet.
Now this is a fairly long, involved recipe -- 2 rises. It took most of the morning, although I did other tasks in between.

After the second rise, the muffins looked like this. They're on parchment paper.
After baking, they looked like this: golden brown, and very light weight. The recipe said to bake them for about 30 minutes at 425 degrees. If I'd done that, they would have been black. These were baked at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes, and the bottom pan were still burnt on the bottom.
First taste. This was warm from the oven, split, with orange marmalade and lemon curd. The marmalade was better. The inside of the muffin was splendid,very soft. The outside top was too bready (although I love bread). But the outside bottom was nearly divine; it had a crunchy texture that was wonderful, combined with the soft inside.
Later, I had a second muffin, split and toasted. Very good also, but better right out of the oven, of course.