Thursday, October 23, 2008

Cranberry Scones


Hot Cranberry Scones

I'm admittedly not much of a baker. Unlike stove top cooking, baking is more of a science, demanding precision and perfect timing for best results. I always end up taking a peek and letting all the heat out of the oven, sabotaging the outcome. My baking repertoire is limited to recipes that come with pre-measured ingredients packaged in a handy box. "just add wet ingredients to form a dough. Don't overmix". That much I can manage.

I've never eaten a scone until I met T1. Come to think of it, I don't think I even knew what one was. After she turned me on to them, I was hooked. They're usually pretty dense, fluffy on the inside, crumbly-even crunchy on the outside with just enough sweetness.

For some reason I was craving scones this morning. We didn't have any scones in the house but we did have a package of scone mix my Mom sent to us with an excellent personal review. I read the back of the package and all it required was a cup of milk and some melted margarine or butter. That much we had. Just to be fancy, I tipped in a bag of dried cranberries (craisins) in the mix and 20 minutes later, I had 10 hot, fluffy scones.


Straight out of the oven

The best way to eat scones is hot with a dollop of English clotted cream, a sort of halfway between cream and butter, and jam. We usually get jars of clotted cream from the Continental Shop British store in Santa Monica and sometimes find it at Cost Plus World Market. Today, Kerrygold Irish butter stood in for the clotted cream. Luckily, we had a fresh jar of Hartley's Best Blackberry Jam "proper English stuff!".


Cranberry Scone with Butter and Jam

If you find yourself in the mood for hot scones, see if you can find Ivy Cottage Original Scone Mix. It lived up to my Mom's recommendation and is so easy to make even a baking challenged guy like me can manage to crank them out with convincing results. Craving satisfied!



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