This post went through quite a few titles. A Madness of Scones. Game of Scones. A Scone Baking Marathon. None of them really seemed to work, so the title is what it is. Because it was scone crazy!
My goal: Bake 40 scones of 5 different flavors in about 3 hours. Am I mad? Yes, probably so.
Some things I learned:
- My baking limit for one day seems to be 3 recipes. If I try to make any more than that, I make mistakes! Lots of them.
- Don’t try to do this sort of thing when your kids are still doing their schoolwork. Next time, pick a school day off.
- Don’t skip the glaze! They make scones look pretty.
I have a go-to scone recipe that I’ve been using for a few years. I just tried to modify it slightly for each flavor that I made.
The flavors:
- Cardamom-ginger with milk chocolate chips
- Cranberry-orange with white chocolate chips
- Lemon poppyseed
- Coconut-almond with dark chocolate chips
- Maple cream
The basic recipe:
Basic Scone Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 tbsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 5 tbsp unsalted butter
- 1 cup heavy cream
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
- Sift together dry ingredients; flour, baking powder, salt, sugar. Using pastry blender, cut in the butter to coat pieces with flour. Mixture should look like coarse crumbs. Make well in center and pour in heavy cream. Fold everything together; do not overwork.
- Press dough out on lightly floured surface into a circle about 8 inches in diameter. Cut circle into 8 wedges. Place scones on ungreased cookie cheet and brush with heavy cream. Bake 15-20 minutes until golden brown.
This was my main work area for 3 hours. I did have to stop for about 30 minutes and feed my kids their lunch. I started around 10 AM, and all the scones were baked by about 1:45 PM. I used the big yellow bowl for one dough, got the scones into the oven, and then I would wash the bowl, any measuring cups/spoons and spatulas I would need for the next dough. I still had dishes, but it was definitely less than it could have been!
This is the dough for the cardamom-ginger and milk chocolate chips scones. I had tried this one with dark chocolate chips a week ago, but the dark chocolate kind of overwhelmed the flavor of the spices.
I topped these scones with 1/4 cup of candied ginger. I think these are my favorite of the scones I made.
The cardamom-ginger scones after baking. I had originally wanted to put the candied ginger IN the dough, but they got lost in there! Putting them on top of the scones was a good change. I loved getting the sugary spice of ginger in every bite.
The cranberry-orange scones with white chocolate chips were pretty straightforward. The only additions to the basic recipe were orange zest rubbed into the sugar, 1/2 cup of dried cranberries, and the juice of a small orange added to the cream. I would probably add a 1/2 tsp of orange extract next time. For some reason, I didn’t get a picture of these after they were done baking.
The dry ingredients for my lemon poppyseed scones. If you look in the lower right corner of the pictures, you can see some of my hand-written recipe additions.
I know the recipe says to use a pastry cutter to cut the butter in, but it was easier to use my hands. This is the dough after I had rubbed the butter in.
The scone dough all ready to be put on the cookie sheet. I am loving having a bench knife. I should have bought one ages ago!
If any of the scones were calling for glaze, it was the lemon poppyseed ones!
After I had finished the lemon poppyseed scones, things started to get hairy. I guess I lost my momentum. I also had to stop to feed my kids and feed myself. After lunch, I started making mistakes. As a result, these scones didn’t turn out quite as well as the first three.
I toasted the shredded coconut for the 4th batch of scones. I’m not sure why this shredded coconut is so small compared to the ones you buy in the large bags. This is Bob’s Red Mill unsweetened shredded coconut. I don’t care much for coconut, so these scones were mostly for Josh, who loves coconut. Maybe toasting the coconut messed me up because I forgot to put the butter in the scone dough!
I attempted to save the dough by adding the butter even though I had already added the cream to the flour mixture. As a result, the texture of these scones is different than the first three.
I also made a mistake somehow with my maple cream scones. I’m not sure if it was the cream/syrup mixture or if I didn’t add enough flour at first. I will definitely have to fiddle with these a little more. Perhaps I even need to use a different recipe altogether instead of modifying my basic one.
Did we eat all of these scones ourselves? I’m sure we probably could have, but it would have taken us a few days. I gave about half of them away. Hopefully, the recipients won’t feel too much like they were part of some kind of kitchen experiment!
-Lynn
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