Last night I watched a Miss Marple BBC movie. As the various murder plots unraveled some where in a small English tea joint scones were served. Several times.
Scones. Man, did those sound good. So, I started roaming through some bread recipe books on the shelf. The most difficult part of the process was figuring out how to spell S-C-O-N-E-S.
Once that mystery was resolved the basic scone recipe appeared on page 369. Creating scones is so simple one wonders if there’s a mistake in the recipe. Maybe a page is missing.
Not so. It’s really pretty simple. The difficult part is deciding what special ingredients to add. (more later)
Here’s the Icon Scone recipe, for all you Miss Marple fans.
3 cups white flour
4 teaspoons baking power
1 ½ teaspoon salt
1 stick butter (8 tablespoons)
1 cup butter milk*
*I used expired half and half. The reason is that I like it with coffee, but never am able use an entire pint before it goes south. So, expired pints sit in my 'frig.
Spray one cookie sheet and turn the oven to 400.
Mix the dry ingredients. Then take the butter slab and slice into thin pieces – the size of a quarter that’s in your pocket.
Dump the butter into the dry mix. Then the fun begins. I mix this stuff with a dough whisk. If you don’t own one, don’t go out and buy one. Use a fork. Whisk (or fork) until the butter becomes the size of grains of rice. This takes about two minutes.
Then stick your hands in and wad the mixture into two softball-size rounds.
Now it’s decision time. Do you want to add something to the mixture? I dumped some dried currants in one of the softballs. I dumped some almond slices in the other.
Flatten both balls into a six-inch diameter. Take a knife and cut each into six pieces. Place in oven, turn timer to 20 minutes, clean up the mess and reheat your coffee from earlier in the day. Milk is just as good.
Sit and wait for timer to go off.
Allow the scones to cool, if you can. Then dig in.
By this time in the task, Miss Maple solved the crimes.
P.S.: Some people put jelly on scones – me included. My preference is apple butter.
