The Quickbread Curse Lives On

The floury mess, the lid off the milk...made me think of my mother in law's kitchen!
I had to take this picture of the post-scone kitchen mayhem for you, Delores. :-)

This Saturday is the Spring Fayre at Merrit's school, and the parents have been asked to bring in scones for a bake sale. Scones are like sweet Southern-style biscuits with mix-ins, sometimes savory (cheese) and sometimes sweet (dried fruit, berries, or nuts). Is your mouth watering?

I have been taste testing scones from various shops and bakeries around town (see how I made that sound scientific?), but I wasn't ready to try baking them yet, given my history with The Scone's close cousin, The Biscuit. [Cue scary music.]

The Biscuit and I have been sworn enemies since 1995. No matter how many times I stood at the elbow of my mother-in-law, Delores, and watched her technique, I could not reproduce the results. I swore she was leaving out one critical step or ingredient! (By the way, it's not just me. My niece Page can't make biscuits either, and she's related by blood!)

Last year, one of my New Year's Resolution was to finally get the hang of making a good biscuit--not even perfect, just good, since Biscuit Perfection comes only from Delores's kitchen. I kept at it, combining Delores's technique (always, always use White Lily and knead 10 times in the bowl before turning out the dough--no more, no less) with a little of Alton Brown's recipe (use half butter, half shortening) with a few of my own adaptations (bake it on a pizza stone instead of a cookie sheet).

So, yeah, I actually got the hang of it. Biscuits, that is.

Scones?

Not so much.

It doesn't matter how prettily you arrange them on the plate. Still sad.

All was going well in the beginning. I learned, from Delores, that you should be choosy about your self-rising flour and to use what women-who-know have used for generations. At home, that means White Lily. Here it's Be-Ro. I found the original Be-Ro scone recipe online (great little story here, too). And so that's the one I decided to use. Here it is:

Rich Scones  (original Be-Ro recipe)

8 oz BE-RO self raising flour.
Half a teaspoon of salt.
1 ½ oz lard.
1 oz sugar.
Milk to make a soft dough.
2 teaspoonfuls of currents or sultanas.
1 egg beaten.

Method
Mix flour and salt in a basin, rub in the lard./  Mix in the sugar and fruit.  Stir in beaten egg and sufficient milk to make a soft dough.  Roll out to a thickness of half an inch and cut into rounds with a 2½ inch scone cutter.  Place on a greased baking tray, brush the tops with beaten egg and bake in a hot oven (425c) for about 10 minutes
Makes 14 scones

I had to make a few adaptations. Didn't have lard but read online that the best replacement for lard in a scone is to grate frozen butter and work it in while it is still cold.

I have a food scale, otherwise I would have been stumped with the amounts given
in the recipe.

I wanted walnuts in my scones so I added 1 teaspoon of walnuts
to the 2 teaspoons of raisins that the recipe called for.

Here's where things went horribly wrong. The recipe says bake at 425 degrees
Centigrade for about 10 minutes. As you can see, my oven goes to 225 C and
then just says "MAX." Hmmmmm....so, yeah, I just put it on "MAX." Makes sense.

After 10 minutes, the scones looked perfectly delicious! I brewed tea. I took the one that looked most like a "reject" since the rest would be for the school's spring fayre and put it on the plate. Beautiful! 

Yorkshire tea. Strawberry jam. Freshly baked scone. All at 4:00pm, perfect timing. My first English tea at home! I must say I was pretty pleased with myself. 

Until I realized the scones weren't done on the inside. Oops.

Back in the oven. I turned the heat down a bit. At this point, I had nothing to lose so I was just eyeballing the oven temp and guessing at the baking time. Five minutes later, the tops were scorched. Dang it! 

Tomorrow: Take two. I have conquered The Biscuit. I can also conquer The Scone! Just wait and see...