Thursday, October 05, 2006

Minge's scones

This is my famous scone recipe. No, really, it is famous. I hate to blow my own trumpet, but anyone who eats them asks for the recipe.

  • 500g plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
  • 4 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
  • 50g cold unsalted butter, diced
  • 25g Trex (hard vegetable shortening) in small lumps
  • 300ml buttermilk
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract (NOT essence)
  • 25g caster sugar
  • 75g dried chopped apricots
  • 25g almond flakes
  1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 7/220ºC.
  2. Sift the flour, bicarb, cream of tartar and salt into a large bowl.
  3. Rub in the fats to the crumb stage.
  4. Beat the egg and buttermilk together with the vanilla extract (though reserve one tablespoon) and add to the crumbed flour/fat.
  5. Knead breifly to form a dough before adding the apricots.
  6. Roll the dough out to a 3 or 4cm thickness.
  7. Cut scones out with a 6.5cm round cutter. You should get ten or twelve.
  8. Place your scones on a buttered baking sheet, brush with the reserved tablespoon of buttermilk/egg/vanilla mixture before scattering them with the flaked almonds and slam them into the oven.
  9. Bake for ten minutes (depending on your oven) or until well risen and golden.
  10. Serve warm from the oven with clotted cream, your favourite jam and a nice cup of coffee.
You can substitute the dried fruit for any other kind, really. Also, if you don't like the idea of using sugar, use a sugar substitute, honey, black treacle or and kind of syrup. However, if you use a "wet" sweetener, you might need to cut down on the buttermilk slightly. Just experiment. Also, if the thought of using vegetable fat turns your stomach, replace it with another 75g of unsalted butter.

They really are rather good.

Exciting!

Nice to make a scone!

5 comments:

RIC said...

This is one of the few recipes I'm ever going to steal... I'm not much into cooking, but this kind of tasty things are my perdition...
Copy & paste... Stolen!

Unknown said...

Yum! Thank God I live with a Euro to translate!
LOL.
You know, nonfat plain yogurt subs just fine for the veggie fat and makes it a tad moister too! you can do cup for cup spoon for spoon.
Same goes for applesauce. Makes it nonfat and does not change the taste one bit! This comes from my full fledged sugar & fat eating hubby!

Anonymous said...

I like it thick and creamy. I love it. Moist? Dry? Hard? Soft? This is very dirty.

Voix said...

Oh my. Metrics. I don't know if I can handle metrics.

The oven temperature alone is making me twitch a little bit.

Anonymous said...

They love a hot one.