Sunday's scones

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.)

Saturday's scones

Yesterday was a bit of a weird day feeding wise. Breakfast was reasonably normal (although Matt doesn't usually make a fire in the toaster) and then we decided to go out for a walk. But we didn't plan the walk very well from a catering perspective. Matt had packed one packet of prawn cocktail crisps which he ate within about 10 minutes of leaving the car park. So three and half hours later we were pretty hungry.

We had purchased some cut price sardines the previous evening and the plan for lunch was to have these cooked on the barbeque (apparently this is not the correct spelling but I prefer it). Since it was outdoors cooking Matt was in charge. It would theoretically have been a quick process but

• We had to get a barbeque fish cooking implement – the first place we tried had sold out of nearly everything barbeque related but we were successful at our second detour
• Although apparently the fish were gutted they needed quite a bit of fettling up before they met Matt's strict culinary requirements. This involved cleaning and stuffing with lemon and capers.

So it was nearly 6pm by the time we ate our lunch (we had had a snack of mushroom paté on crackers). It was delicious but we weren't going to want a big meal later on (I had planned to make a curry); instead Matt persuaded me to make some scones. This would be a nice way to conclude our Devon day. These were going to be sour cream scones (since I had some cut price sour cream to use up) but I fancied something savoury so deviated somewhat and embarked upon some cheese scones.

This would finally give me a chance to use up the butter that smelt of cheese in something that it wouldn't matter if it tasted of cheese. Amazingly the recipe required 50g of butter and this is exactly how much I had left. I love it when things like this happen. I had 60g of very strong cheddar (I don't know where the other 340g has disappeared to so quickly), which was only 10g more than the recipe called for. I find that recipes tend to under cheese things so put it all in (after grating). I also added some un-reciped chives. I had been inspired to do this when Matt had asked me earlier if what was in the pot by the barbeque was chives. I don't know exactly how many chives I added, I suppose about 12 of average length chopped up small with scissors.

The recipe says to roll out the dough to 1cm thick but I find that it always sticks to the rolling pin so I just sorted of patted it out instead. And then it says to use your 6.5cm biscuit cutter, but I only have a 7cm or 6cm biscuit cutter so I chose the 6cm on the basis that more scones is better than bigger scones. They bake at the hottest the oven goes until risen and golden. I nearly forgot about them but was reminded by the smell of cooking and got back to them just in time, after about 10 minutes.

So that was our tea last night. I had one with butter substitute, then one with half yeast extract and half cream cheese with garlic and herbs, and then a final half with butter substitute. Personally I think they could have done with more cheese (even though I did use what purports to be very strong cheddar) but Matt described them as pleasantly cheesey. We had another one each for breakfast this morning. And then one more as a mid-morning snack. Scones taste best fresh so it would have been wasteful if we hadn't eaten them up.