Blog Scone Crazy

I received a couple of emails this week after I posted about our little tea-parties, asking for scone recipes so I thought I'd share a few today.

From left to right: crescent moon shapes - wholemeal cheese scones topped with sesame seeds; round shapes - marmalade scones; heart shapes - sultana scones; flower (sort of!) shapes - apricot scones.

As I said in the tea party post, scones are a great store-cupboard baked item because there's no need for yeast or eggs or anything complicated. They're also really cheap to make and the method is so simple that they are a perfect baking project for a beginner to tackle by themselves or for very young children to join in with mixing, rolling and cutting.

All the recipes are based on the plain scone recipe and adapted for variety.

Basic Scones

200g plain flour

50g butter

25g sugar

1 heaped teaspoon baking powder

Milk

Mix the baking powder into the flour and rub in the butter until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar and add enough milk (a little at a time) to form a dough. Roll out and cut as desired, placing them on a floured baking tray. Bake in a hot oven for 10-15 minutes.

For fruit scones (including apricot and sultana): add 25-75g dried fruit to the mixture before adding the milk.

For marmalade scones: substitute the sugar with 2 tablespoons marmalade.

For Wholemeal cheese scones: substitute half of the flour with wholemeal flour, omit the sugar and add grated cheese (about 50g) to the mixture before adding milk. You may like to add salt too.

Other variations:

You can make the scones shiny by brushing with egg and milk before baking. A halfway point is to brush with milk - they don't go shiny but they aren't too floury either.

You can add seeds to the mixture and/or sprinkle them on top. Sesame and poppy seeds are particularly good. The seeds will stick better if you have brushed the scones first.