Having eaten a huge amount of bread
yesterday (in the form of both bread and homemade pizza) I decided
that we needed to ease off a bit. But we have a lot of soup to eat
(made last weekend and I stupidly didn't make sure that there was
space to freeze some before doing so – there wasn't) and while soup
on its own for one meal in a day is just fine, for two meals in a day
it isn't. We had a bowl of leek, potato and lentil each for lunch so
I was thinking that it might be jacket potato time for tea.
But that all changed this afternoon
with a trip to a local historic house. We didn't plan to go to the
house (and actually we didn't), just have a walk around the estate to
see the Autumn colours and top-up in the café. As it happened we
also encountered the “Christmas Festival” (which explained the long
queues and unusual one-way system), in which we didn't get anything
Christmas-sy but did come out with two rather lovely clocks. This is
what Matt and I have been intending to buy with some money kindly
given to us by my aunt and uncle for our wedding, and now (only a
little over 5 years later) we finally found the perfect items.
But I digress. Due to the "festival", the
café top-up happened before the walk. This is obviously the wrong
way round but I didn't want to risk café closure before we had got
round – I'm dawdling even more than usual at the mo. We were quite
good and shared a piece of chocolate caramel shortbread but I was
very tempted by a cheese scone. What swung it was that I decided I
could make a cheese scone a lot easily than the sweeter option. The
chocolate caramel shortbread was delicious but all around the walk I
was thinking about cheese scone. So, jacket potatoes were off and
soup with cheese scone was on.
I wanted to try a different recipe to
that which I have done previously and pulled out one for “spicy
cheese scones” for my box. This called for caraway seeds, which I
don't have (I think I really like them) but the basic recipe looked
achievable. I had a slight moment of panic when I realised that I
needed to add some cream of tartar as I didn't think I had any of
that either (I'm intrigued as to what this actually is) but found an
unopened tub in the baking cupboard. I mixed the dry ingredients
together as instructed but also added ¼ of a teaspoon of mustard
powder. This was as well as the listed cayenne pepper but it's so
rare that I get an opportunity to use mustard powder and I
accidentally have two nearly whole tins that I didn't want to pass on
this rare chance.
Instead of using my fingers to rub the
butter into the dry ingredients I used the food processor which is
probably a good idea when cayenne pepper is involved. At least it was
a good idea once I had spent a few moments befuddled before realising
that I had missed a crucial component from the food processor
assembly. Then you stir in the cheese. The recipe said 75g. I
measured 85g before grating – you can never grate the last little
bit that you're holding so you need to eat that, which accounts for
the extra 10g. I have given up buying anything except the most mature
cheddar I can find on special offer and I was hoping this would make
the scones satisfyingly cheesy.
It was at the cheese stirring in stage
that I thought that the butter might not have been properly
incorporated into the dry ingredients. But it was too late to do
anything about that now so I just carried on: stirring in an egg and
about 150ml of milk. It would have been wise to not add all the milk
at once but hindsight is a wonderful and the dough seemed only a
little bit too soggy. But it was too soggy to be able to roll and cut
so, rather than make individual scones, I sort of patted it out into
two giant ones (a baking tray each). I scored them to mark
approximate quarters and put them in the pre-heated oven at the
hottest temperature possible (apparently that's a trick with scones).
The baking time for individual scones was stated as 8 minutes so I
gave these big ones ten – after which they were smelling amazing
and looking tempting.
While they cooled I had just enough
time to reheat us a bowl of spiced pumpkin and sherry soup each. I
made the mistake of cutting the scones initially (this damages the
texture), but quickly realised that they should actually be torn
apart. The amazing smell and tempting look was justified – perhaps
the best cheese scone I have ever eaten (apart from in a hospital
canteen in Oxford - seriously, they were amazing). The inside was really light and the outside had just the right sort of crunch about it. Matt's description was "munchifiable in the extreme" - these will be
making a repeat appearance!
(Oh, and the soup wasn't bad either.)
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