Scones
Contents
Base Recipe
Here’s the basic recipe for all of the scones that follow. It makes 16 scones and takes about 30 minutes from start to finish.
Ingredients
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 Tbsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 8 Tbsp cold butter, cut into small cubes
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 2/3 cup milk
Directions
- Place an oven rack in the center of your oven, then preheat it to 425ºF. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
- Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt in a mixing bowl. Cut in pieces of cold butter until the mixture has the consitency of sand and sticks together in clumps when squeezed in your palm.
- Stir in sugar.
- Add milk gradually, stirring until a dough comes together. Divide dough in half and keep bowl covered while working.
- Remove the first portion from the bowl onto a floured surface. Form the dough into a disk, fold in half, then reform into a disk about an inch and a half thick. Cut the disk into 8 scones radially, and place them onto the prepared sheet. Cover the sheet with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel while you repeat this process with the other portion.
- Bake scones for 12-15 minutes, until golden brown on top. Depending on your oven, you may need to rotate the pan halfway through baking.
Scones of Fire and Ice
For the red and blue aspects of this, I decided to employ habanero peppers and blueberries. The end result is a scone with a prominent fruit flavor accented by floral notes from the peppers, and a little bit of heat. Don’t be afraid of the habaneros—several of my friends who can’t handle the heat found the scones to be just right.
Do wear gloves when prepping the peppers, though.
Ingredients
Everything from the base recipe, plus
- 1 habanero pepper, seeds and white membrane removed, finely minced
- 3/4 cup blueberries, or so (whatever looks good to you). Blueberries are one of the few fruits that don’t really suffer from freezing, so feel free to use frozen berries if they’re not in season. If using frozen blueberries, there’s no need to defrost them.
Directions
Begin following the instructions for the base recipe, adding in the minced peppers rigth after the sugar, and the blueberries right after that. Once the extra ingredients have been integrated, proceed as directed.
Scones of Feast and Famine
The “black” element of these are blackberries, and the green is sage. I strongly believe that fruit and herb parings are underused in household baking. Sage goes especially well with blueberries and blackberries.
Ingredients
Everything from the base recipe, plus
- 1 cup blackberries, or so (whatever looks good to you). Ideally fresh!
- 12-14 fresh sage leaves, stems trimmed. Do not subsitute dried or rubbed sage here. It has a fundamentally different flavor.
Directions
- Begin following the instructions for the base recipe, right up until you’ve stirred in the sugar.
- Chiffonade the sage leaves: stack them up, then roll the stack them into a cigar shape parallel to the stem, and slice the roll into thin ribbons perpendicular to the stem. Mince the sage into fine pieces. Stir the sage into the dry mixture.
- Add blackberries to the dry mixture and toss to combine.
- Proceed with the base recipe from adding the milk.