If you want something that looks fancy and extravagant, and will make any tea party or picnic look as though you’ve really gone to a massive effort, but that comes with a recipe that’s really, no joke, easy, then scones might be for you.
Ingredients
85g butter, diced into small cubes
350g self raising flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
4 tbsp caster sugar
200ml milk, preferably room temperature, plus a little extra for the tops
Method
Preheat the oven to 200C/180C/Gas mark 6, and line a baking tray with grease proof paper. To start, mix the flour and the butter together in a bowl until it’s combined. Once combined, add in the salt, bicarbonate of soda and the sugar, and stir all together.
Next, add the milk, and while you’re adding it in mix it all together using a knife – this is asked in the recipe, but I’m not sure why a knife? Don’t over mix the mixture, but get it to a point where it makes a dough that you can pick out in your hands and it’s one ball of scone mixture.
Sprinkle a little flour on the worktop, and gently pat the mixture with your hands until it’s about one inch thick all over. Using a round cookie cutter, cut out little individual scones out from the mixture and space them out evenly on the baking tray. When you’ve used all the dough space roll it back up and then repeat, until you’ve run out of dough. With the spare dough that’s left, I make a little scone shape with my hands and then you can use this one as a tester to see if they’re cooked.
When you’re finished cutting out, brush the tops of the scones with a little milk. This will give them a golden brown colour. Bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes, using your spare dough tester scone to make sure they’re cooked in the middle. When they’re cooked, take them out the oven and place on a wire race to cool.
To serve
For my picnic, I made a mixture of savoury and sweet scones. For the savoury, I cut them in half and filled with slices of mature cheddar cheese and slices of ham. Then, for the sweet, it’s obviously got to be clotted cream and jam – raspberry jam in my scones.
xx
