More Muffins

It's been a while since we've had a picture of muffins, so here is a selection
on sale in Ashton Market Hall.

These are proper Lancashire oven bottom muffins, not the fairy cakes with chocolate chips or blueberries found in America.

As the name implies, they are cooked on the bottom of a hot oven. If they are baked higher in the oven they rise more and end up something like barm cakes or tea cakes. Tradition has it that bakers in the area started making them using left-over dough and baked them on the oven bottom while his ordinary bread was baking on the shelves higher up.