A while back our friend Kristine gave us a package of Harry & David’s Scone Mix which, sadly, languished in our pantry for quite some time before we got around to making them. Though we’ve always enjoyed the results of baking, we’ve never spent much time at it and the scone mix fell victim to our laziness.
However, on one particularly low-budget Sunday we pulled them out, whipped them up, and fell instantly in love with Scones. They were steamy and warm and soaked up the melting butter and jam that we’d slathered them with. They were delicious. We ate them all that day between the 3 of us.
That experience led us to load up on several packages the next time we swung by the Woodburn Outlets where the Harry & David’s store is located. After a few more scone-filled weekends passed we decided to give a from-scratch recipe a shot and – behold! – Gavin & Julie’s Sunday Morning Scones.
Once we had decided to jump on the grenade and make them from scratch we spent about 5 minutes scouring the internet looking at various recipes before throwing this one together. Mostly we decided on this particular blend of ingredients because we happened to have all the stuff on hand. Some of the recipes called for whole cream, buttermilk, or baking soda – none of which we had – so they were quickly eliminated. The scone recipe we finally wound up with is elegantly simple: All-purpose Flour, Butter, Sugar, Salt, Baking Powder, Skim Milk, and an Egg.
Los Ratios:
- 2 cups All-purpose flour (we actually used 1 1/2 cups of All-purpose Flour and 1/2 cup of Whole Wheat Pastry Flour because that’s what we had, it didn’t seem to affect the texture at all) plus some for dusting the kneading surface
- 2 Tbsp Sugar
- 1 Tbsp Baking Powder
- 1/2 tsp Salt
- 3 Tbsp Unsalted Butter, very cold and cut into cubes
- 1 Egg, beaten
- 1/2 cup Skim Milk
Das How-to:
- Preheat the oven to 400°.
- In a large bowl mix all the dry ingredients together with a fork.
- Cut in the Unsalted Butter. (note: this was a bit of work, we don’t have a fancy cutter-inner so we used the fork to mash it all together. We might try the dueling butterknives method next time but a fork worked just fine.)
- Add the Egg and mix it all together.
- Add the Milk and mix it until you have a kind of sticky and pretty wet dough, you may need to adjust the quantity of milk a little so don’t dump it all in at once…
- Turn the dough out on to a flour-dusted surface and knead it 8 or 10 times, dusting it with additional flour as needed.
Some artistic license can be used in the next step:
We separated the dough ball into 3 equal parts, flattened them into discs about an inch thick and cut them into quarters. This gave us Scones about the size of a large lime or a small lemon. You could always flatten out the whole dough ball and cut it into larger pieces if you’d like but you’ll have to adjust the baking time accordingly. We like having 12 cute little Scones so we’ll stick with our method.
Lay them out on a cookie sheet and bake them for about 8 to 10 minutes until they’re perfectly/deliciously/wonderfully golden brown on the outside and perfectly/deliciously/wonderfully steamy, light & fluffy on the inside.
Split them in half and smother them with butter and jam (clotted cream is hard to come by in these parts) and try not to eat them all in one sitting. Go ahead, just try…
There’s a couple of things we’d like to try with future batches. First, a sprinkle of raw sugar over the top would give them a nummy sweet crunch that we think would be awesome. Also, one recipe suggested the addition of another Tbsp of sugar and the zest of a lemon. We love all things lemon so this sounds like a match made in heaven to us.
Tons of recipes also called for the addition of nuts, dried cranberries (or other dried fruit), or chocolate chips – any of which would be good but we were just targeting a basic scone recipe that could serve as a vehicle for gargantuan quantities of butter and jam…because it was Sunday…
I am reading Molly Wizenberg’s new book “A Homemade Life” and in it she has a tip for cutting butter. She suggests freezing the butter and then coarsely grating it into the flour & then every 1/4 stick or so stirring the buter shreds under the dry flour. Might be worth a shot!
That’s such a great tip! That would make it so much easier, we’ll definitely try that the next time we make these. Thanks, Lyndie!
[...] From-Scratch Sunday Morning Scones [...]
it would be nice to know how long to cook them for…..?
Sorry ’bout that. It’s actually in the ‘artistic license’ section, guess we should’ve made that a bit more prominent. :/
8 to 10 minutes should be about right.