Making Scones From Scratch

I love a good scone. I like them to be a little cakey, not too dry and crumbly. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I have a baker friend who makes wonderful scones, so I'm a little spoiled. Unfortunately, she only makes them now and then, and this is not that time. Since I'm in the mood for scones, I turned to my friend Google to help me out

I found a recipe that looked good and decided to give it a try.

Watch Me Make It Here

The Original Recipe

I used this RECIPE from Maple and Thyme. Spoiler, these weren't quite as good as my friends, but they were pretty darn close. I will definitely make them again.

You can watch me make them in the video above. I made two different batches, trying out a couple of options as well as different mix-ins.

My first batch - I used cake flour rather than all-purpose, and I grated the frozen butter with a box grater. I made full-sized scones using a cup of sour cherries that I froze last year. These were not overly sweet, which I thought was perfect. However, if you like a sweeter scone, I would suggest sprinkling them with coarse sugar before baking or serving them with a drizzle of icing.

My second batch - I used all-purpose flour, and I used my food processor to grate the butter. I used butterscotch chips and chopped pecans. Since the butterscotch chips are very sweet and therefore very rich, I decided to make mini-scones. Instead of shaping the dough into one disk, I split the dough in half and made two disks. Therefore, I ended up with 16 mini-scones vs 8 full-sized scones. Spoiler. OMG, these were also very delicious.

For both batches, I used heavy cream vs buttermilk, because that's what I had on hand. I can't imagine the difference in milk made much difference in the final product.

Grating the Butter

The recipe recommended grated frozen butter. It seems important to keep the ingredients as cold as possible. Grating the butter with the box grater was a bit of work. I think it took me at least 5 minutes to grate it. That doesn't seem like a long time, but it took a lot of elbow grease to make that happen. For the next batch, I decided to use the grater in my food processor. This worked fine, but I'm not sure my food processor cared for it! It sounded a bit tired.

I'm wondering if I could have used the pastry blender or food processor to blend cool (not frozen) butter into the flour, and then put the flour mixture in the freezer for a bit. I will try that when I make my next batch.

Variations

One thing I love about scones is the many versions you can make! I made cherry and butterscotch pecan in the video above, but there are many other options! Try these mix-ins:

• Fruit, just be sure it's diced into small pieces and remove any liquid.

• Chocolate or Cinnamon chips.

• Any nut you love, chopped.

• Dried fruit like craisins, dried cherries, or raisins.

• Lemon - add 1 TBSP of zest into the wet ingredients.

• Herbs - decrease sugar down to 2 TBSP and skip vanilla. Then add in a bunch of fresh herbs, chopped.

• Cheddar and chives - decrease sugar to 2 TBSP, skip vanilla and add in 1/4 chopped chives and 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese.

Get creative. Combine mix-ins, come up with some others.

Pin It For Later