In my professional opinion

thank you butter!

Scones are a delicacy.  There is something so emotionally stabilizing  that happens when you bite into a perfectly crafted scone.  The problem lies in the fact that most people just don’t make scones properly.  Scones ought to be cakey and flakey all at the same time.  If they are too cakey, they are just glorified coffee cakes.  Normally scones that border on overly cakey are also a tad bit dry.  The magic of scones is that the perfection of a beautiful scone is not a terribly difficult thing to achieve.  It’s all in the butter.

This post by The Pioneer Woman put the scone bug in me.  The recipe ratio looked perfect.  Well I don’t have the money to buy $5 vanilla beans, so I chopped dried apricots and almond pieces and added a tablespoon of cinnamon instead.  But that’s just me on a college student budget.  Trust me I would LOVE to have vanilla beans in my kitchen.  As I was making her recipe I realized The Pioneer Woman did that annoying thing everyone who messes up scones does.

Dear Ree, I love you dearly so please don’t be mad at me about this correction, but don’t ever blend the butter into the flour!

To properly make scones, I cut the cold butter and added it to the flour.  I then cut the butter by hand.  To do this squish the butter into thin quarter-sized pieces.  They should be almost paper thin, but don’t have to all be the same size.  The beauty of butter is that it creates lovely pockets which create flakes within the scone.  Butter does this because it contains water.  When the butter melts and the water evaporates it creates steam and beautiful little pockets often felt as flakiness in your mouth.  Imagine an amazing pie crust that just melts in your mouth.  Now thank butter.  Hand blending the flour is how you create flakes in biscuits when you make them.  A scone doesn’t need the exact flakes of the biscuit and the addition of heavy cream – or milk, because I didn’t want to make a second trip to the store – lessons the extreme flakiness found in a biscuit.  But either way it is the butter not completely blended into the flour that creates a perfect scone.

If you were never a fan of scones, try to make them yourself hand blending the butter.  I promise it will change your life.  Scones also freeze really well.  They are in my freezer right now, so I can pull them out every morning for a tasty homemade breakfast.  It sure beats cereal.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily