I have conquered the scone

A few days ago I made some scones to take to my friend's house (we were dyeing yarn, as mentioned below). I chose a new recipe (first time making scones, I'm usually a muffin person)but, being in a hurry, I didn't exactly read it. I sort of threw everything together without a thought for accurate measurements, the day's humidity, and a myriad of other things. This wasn't a problem until I got to the part where one is to add cream, I quickly measured and poured. Big mistake.

Rather than a dough that was still floury enough that it took a bit of kneading to bring together, I had just created batter soup. Lovely. Thinking quickly, I ditched the great plans I had of shaping the dough and cutting out delicate triangles, instead I grabbed a spoon and began scooping the mixture onto a cookie tray. Then I baked them. The final product resembled a muffin-top type thingy. Also, since I had used blueberries the scones were blue. Not exactly the baked good I had hoped for.

At any rate, today, I set out to conquer the scone. Using the cream scones recipe from the American's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook (my favorite cookbook!) I tried again.

By the way, what inspired me to try again, is the way that Deb's scones, (who has an amazing food blog called Smitten Kitchen) turned out.

I used chopped up dried cranberries in place of the currants. In the future, I would use frozen cranberries because the dried cranberries became very chewy and candy-like after being baked.



The recipe is very simple and quick to throw together, my one tip is: do not add all the cream at once, instead add it in 1/8cup increments kneading it in between (or during) installments. Baked goods are extremely finicky, sometimes flour needs lots of wet ingredients to create the perfect consistency, other times, it needs half the amount. Be sure you know what you're aiming for before baking, it makes it a lot easier to adjust the recipe to fit the conditions in your kitchen.

As you can see, I shaped the dough into a sort of square shape, and cut it into triangles.

And, after 15minutes in the oven, I achieved success:

Also in case you're wondering what I've been up to in the land of knitting, I haven't actually been knitting that much at all...I have been frogging though! I recently frogged these, for the reasons on my project page.