Scones

I’m writing this on Friday 24th June, what is apparently ‘National Cream Tea Day’, and while the cynic in me suggests that this is just another marketing opportunity, I also seem to have succumbed to scone fever with two recent events requiring the baking of scones in fairly large quantities.

However, it’s not me doing the baking - James is the one who’s rather good at scones - so much so that I call his scones ‘the clouds’. Hence, another recipe-sharing blog post (jump to recipe).

Scone recipes are really really variable, especially regarding how much sugar and butter you use, suggesting a good deal of do as you like, but one thing I definitely recommend is going for a recipe with an egg. It probably tips the mixture a little more towards cakes, but seems to make it so much easier to get a light texture. Our recipe doesn’t have much sugar either, so is a definitely more suited to adding a whole load of jam. And yes, for a special occasion good jam is needed, not glucose/fructose syrup jam.

Anyway, back to the events, the first (which you might describe as a practice for the second) being our local First Saturday of the Month 5 km race on 4th June, where the call had gone out to bring cakes, ideally scones, for participants as part of its Queen’s jubilee theme.

The only thing was, we weren’t quite sure how many were wanted, so we ended up making 16. However, so did quite a few other people, and after we’d taken them up there (nearly making us late for the race with splitting and adding jam and cream), it was clear there was going to be over-provision - in the end, a good deal of them were eaten, but a good number also came back home with us. Not a hardship you might say; although really scones are a day-of-baking eat, that’s only necessary to experience perfect cloudiness!

The second event came with rather more pressure, as I’d long-ago volunteered James to provide scones for my sister’s wedding. And this took place in… Cornwall, home of scones.

Baking can be challenging enough even in your home oven, but there’s added ‘fun’ in a location ~300 miles away. And, other than moral support, I wasn’t going to be of much use on the day, as getting ready would take up my time (a week’s holiday at the seaside including a trip out on a boat doesn’t do any favours to your hair).

We’d of course started with a list of things to pack that might not be required on a usual holiday - ingredients (minus eggs!), scales, rolling pin, baking and cooling trays, cutters. And by making sure that ordering of clotted cream and jam were under control.

And then nothing left to do but a fairly early morning start so the scones would be as fresh as possible. The back-right scone over baked in the oven, we’d not brought an egg wash brush, and were thankful our accommodation had a sieve, which had also been forgotten (in fact, the place we stayed was provisioned with more kitchen equipment than you might expect). We then found we had to borrow a tea towel for the scone serving tray, but as one was a Cornish flag, that seemed appropriately themed. Phew, no disasters. Guests were counting on us.

Our instructions were to arrive with the scones already loaded with cream and jam, and to do half of the scones jam first (the Cornwall way) and half cream first (the Devon way), which we dutifully followed.

At home, we do usually only get as far as whipped cream, but when in Cornwall… three whole 1 lb tubs of clotted cream had been provided. OK, we actually only used one, but the larger tubs gave a suitable showing off for the layer of butter that forms on the top of clotted cream, which I’ve actually only just learnt is so-called because it’s made by heating whole milk until ‘clots’ of cream rise to the surface.

After a quick change for the baker into wedding clothes, the only remaining difficulty was to get the now 50 half scones safely to the venue during typical English summer weather (wind, rain and sun) and without potholes causing bouncing for the tray. Hurrah for no actual rain during the decanting of the scones from kitchen to car and back from car to the venue’s kitchen!

In celebration of this achievement, the only appropriate thing to do was to make sure the baker also acted as server.

I can say that the Cornish jam-then-cream way seemed the most popular, but that might have been because the photographer, the only native Cornwall-resident to try one, loudly proclaimed that as a must shortly after we brought them out.

They all vanished quite quickly! Yummy.

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Extra shots

• The definitive blog post on converting plain flour into self-raising
  https://breadcakesandale.com/2014/01/30/converting-plain-to-self-raising-flour/
• A quite different blueberry scone recipe with cream in the scone itself that I fancy trying
  https://www.milkandmore.co.uk/recipe/blueberry-scones
• On the language of baked goods
  https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2006/07/baked-goods.html

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Credits

Thank you to the person who gave permission to use the picture of James serving scones.