August 28, 2012

• Cranberry Orange Scones

  So last night I decided to make a birthday scone for Mike. Cranberry-orange sounded delicious, and I thought we probably had all the ingredients in the apartment, so I Google'd "cranberry orange scone" and glanced at the first three hits. Here's what I settled on:

  Ingredients--
  1 1/2 c flour
  1/4 c sugar
  3 tsp baking powder
  1/4 tsp salt
  1/4 c butter
  1/2 c dried cranberries
  zest from one tangelo
  1/2 tbs lemon juice
  1/2 c milk

  And I just realized, looking at my little note paper that there actually was an egg in the recipe which I failed to add in. But the scones turned out fine so no harm done I guess. ^^;

  Preheat your oven to 400F.

  In a medium bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
  In a smaller bowl, mix lemon juice and milk. This was my substitute for buttermilk.
  While the fake buttermilk sits, cut the butter into the dry ingredients. I mean literally put the cold butter in the bowl, take a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, and cut the butter into smaller bits while sort of mixing it in. Try to be quick about it so the butter doesn't get soft.
  Add cranberries to dry ingredients. Zest the tangelo into the dry ingredients. The original recipe said 2 tsp of orange zest, but I didn't bother measuring and just zested one whole thing. Also I had a tangelo in the fridge instead of an orange. Whatever.
  Add the buttermilk (and egg if you want to do it right) into the dry ingredients and mix it a bit to make a dough.

  Squish the dough together to try to get all of it to stick, but if there are crumbs on the bottom of the bowl don't worry about it. It's better to not let your hands warm and melt the butter than to get every last bit of flour.

  Make a big round patty thing and put it on a cookie sheet. I made mine around 1-1.5" thick. Try to make it uniform thickness. Mine tapered off at the edges, and then the very edge got sort of burnt. =/
  Cut the patty into 8 wedges, but don't separate the wedges.

  Bake for 15-25 minutes (until "golden brown"). Mine took the full 25 minutes, and turned out lovely.

  I actually cut a slice out at the 20 minute mark, but it was still somewhat gooey inside? Which, given that I forgot the egg would probably have been fine. I was also worried because I could see the edges getting really dark brown and I didn't want them to be super burnt. But I put it back in for 5 minutes and the inside of the scone crisped up, and the edges didn't get noticeably darker.

  The recipe gets you a nice crispy bottom, which I like. And the inside is flakey rather than crispy. So I liked that.

  Oh, also when I ate that early slice, it actually turned out to not be very sweet, so at the end I sprinkled some sugar over the top of the entire thing. I think the recipe I Googled included a glaze that consisted of orange juice + powdered sugar? But I skipped that. So maybe that's why the scone itself was made less sweet (if they assumed you'd have the glaze).

  • 2:45 pm
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