Scotch Egg for the cricket

My lovely friends Will and Milla have an annual cricket match in September. It's the perfect balance between competitive play and crap people being allowed to have a go too. Naturally I am only using the C word with reference to myself, everyone else is county-class. My partner and I's 12 runs were offset by -15 points with three of our balls being caught. And that was despite the kind butterfingers of our field. Nevertheless it was a lot of fun.

At this annual picnic, everyone brings their own lunch and I thought I might experiment with some cold meats. Firstly I had the opportunity to use my friend Charlie's home made CK sauce. It turns out that if you coat chipolatas with this spicy and apple sauce and cook them so that you get a sticky crispy coating, the result is unfortunately too delicious to actually make it to the cricket match the next day. Be warned.

Next, the Scotch Egg. Having debated with Charlie (of CK sauce fame) and his girlfriend Jess whether sausagemeat or minced pork is the better medium for scotch eggs, I can confirm that sausagemeat is excellent but must be handled correctly. You could could make your scotch eggs like this (or..if you try minced pork please let me know how it goes?)

1. boil some eggs so that they are soft boiled. Plunge immediately into cold water and peel. If you leave them to cool not only will they overcook but you might get that weird blue line around the yolk
2. get some good butchers sausages and extract the meat from the casing. I mixed extra sage into mine, you could mix any herbs in or even other ingredients like apple, parmesan cheese, whatever takes your fancy.
3. wash your hands and leave them wet. Form in your left hand a thin slab of sausagemeat, gently drop the egg onto this slab and start making another slab to go over the remaining part of the egg. I found that the loosely-packed sausagemeat worked well after the cooking - the one that I packed more tightly ended up looking like this:
4. As you can see I got all poncy and rolled my good egg in some pine nuts. I know they are a bit 1990s, food style-wise but that doesn't stop them from being delicious.
5. bake at 180-200 for about 20-25 minutes