Did you know it is INTERNATIONAL SCONE WEEK? Tandy the creator of Lavender and Lime is hosting a scone spectacular. If you are a budding baker, scone maker, cream tea partaker…I am sure you will love to see the array of scones that have been made by WordPress bloggers. If you want to take part…prepare a post and link it to Tandy’s INTERNATIONAL SCONE WEEK post. This is Tandy’s host post:
I have eaten quite a few scones during the course of my life. Usually, we partake of scones on visits to National Trust historical houses. After wandering around admiring the tapestries and carpentry, we head to the cafe and order ourselves a cream tea – a big pot of tea to share, along with scones with jam and cream.
I told Jack about a recipe I used to make during my first year working as a cook/baker in a private household. (Yes…they actually paid me money to cook and bake for them…nobody fell ill or was hospitalised during my employment, which was a great boost for my confidence.)
I looked through my recipe file and found the very recipe I had in mind. It is not a recipe for scones, but rather a recipe for a gigantic scone. It is an APPLE AND BLACKBERRY BEAST OF A SCONE!
INGREDIENTS:
- 1 cooking apple
- 25gr caster sugar
- 8 cloves
- 75gr blackberries
- 2tsp cornflour
- 200gr self-raising flour
- pinch of salt
- 1/2tsp ground cinnamon
- 1tsp baking powder
- 75gr unsalted butter
- 25gr oatmeal
- 50g light muscovado sugar
- 90mil milk
TO FINISH:
- milk to glaze
- demerara sugar and medium oatmeal to sprinkle
- 75gr blackberries
So…let’s begin. Before anything else, we had to preheat the oven to 200ºc and lightly grease a 20cm spring-release cake tin.
We then prepared the fruit for the scone. We had to peel, core and slice the apple before putting it into a bowl with the blackberries, sugar, cloves and cornflour. Then we gently mixed it together so that the sugary cornflour is coating all of the fruit.
Then we had to turn our attention to the scone dough. We started by sifting the flour, salt, cinnamon and baking powder and then placing it all into my food processor. Then we added the butter (chopped into small pieces) and processed until the mix resembled breadcrumbs. Then we added the milk, and processed…and we ended up with a soft dough – which was a little bit sticky I thought.
Next was the rolling. After flouring my worktop, we rolled out two thirds of the dough into a circle roughly 23cm. It was very tricky to transfer the rolled out dough into the cake tin. However, the dough is fairly malleable, so it was alright in the end! The recipe said to use the dough so that there is a one inch rim all around. Hopefully, you can see in my photo how that looks.
Then the apple and blackberry fruit mix are piled up inside the center. We brushed the dough around the edge with some milk. After that, we rolled out the remaining third of the dough to form a lid. The dough lid fitted perfectly over the fruit, and we pressed together the edges gently to bind the dough.
Then we brushed the lid with milk and sprinkled with demerara sugar and oatmeal. We baked the scone for thirty minutes.
After the thirty minutes, we took the scone out of the oven and reduced the heat to 160ºc. We scattered the remaining blackberries on top of the scone and sprinkled more demerara sugar and oatmeal before returning to the oven for another twenty minutes.
Then we removed the golden scone from the oven and left it in the tin for five minutes before we transferred it to a cooling rack.
It was very yummy. I definitely had that scone consistency and tasted so lovely, the hint of cinnamon worked so well with the apple and blackberry. Yum! This is Jack’s portion…he had some whipped cream with his. I had mine with a little drizzle of honey.
The recipe said that you can make this with pears, or with peaches and raspberries. I also found a recipe for a huge lemon and blackberry scone in the Waitrose magazine.
Caramel 