Attack of the Scones!

For those of you that know my love of biscuits, it will not be much of a stretch to extol the joys of scones. So buttery, so delicious, and surprisingly, so easy.  We’ve tried recipes before that seemed overly complicated, and the dough was frustrating to work with.  But here comes Southern Living with a pretty good, (almost) fool-proof recipe.  It even comes with 8 (eight!) variations.  Alas, it didn’t come with what seems like the most basic iteration:  blueberry scones.  Never fear, we’ll figure it out!



The ingredients are pretty simple:  flour, sugar, baking powder, butter, and cream.  Plus whatever extra flavor you want to put in (we added blueberries, natch).  The cream is probably the only thing that we don’t typically have on hand all the time.  But I guess if we could make them all the time, then they wouldn’t be special!



Here we mix up the flour, sugar, baking powder, and butter with a pastry cutter.  You don’t have to have one of these….a fork would work just as well.  Then it goes in the freezer for a couple of minutes.  The secret to great scones is to keep everything cold.  Cold butter, cold cream, cold hands, cold heart (just kidding).  Keeping the butter cold gives the scones their flaky, buttery awesomeness.



Next you mix in the blueberries (blueberries, attack!!).  Then add the cream until it forms a dough.  The critical part is getting the right amount of liquid in the dough.  I generally err on the side of too little, because you can always add more.  Another secret is to not knead the dough to much.  Just form it into a circle and then cut it into triangles with a knife.  Nothing more to it!  I only made a half-recipe in this case, so I cut it into 4 scones (a full recipe would be eight). 



I put the scones back in the fridge at this point for a few more minutes to make sure everything is nice and cold.  It also gave the oven some time to heat up.  I then brushed the tops with a little bit more cream so that they would brown up nicely.



Yumm….time to invite the queen over for some tea!

Delicious on their own, or eat it with a little jam.  We’ve also tried making cranberry scones with a little bit of orange zest as a way to mix thinks up.  Check out the Southern Living link for more ideas on flavor combinations.

I say gov'ner....I'll have another!