Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good Scone Recipe
Scones are supposed to be hard. Fresh hard. It’s not open to interpretation.
I did it! I made the best damn scone I ever tasted, and I’m going to show you how to do it too. First, real quick, what makes a scone a scone?
A scone is not a biscuit. It shouldn’t be fluffy. It’s not a cake. It shouldn’t be moist. And it’s not a fucking muffin, Mocha Joe, you jackass… with your wobbly tables. Scones should not be soft.
What makes a scone a scone is its texture — hard, dry, and crumbly. Like Larry David’s personality. In this post, I’ll show you how to make’em just like that.
Non-negotiables for a hard, dry, crumbly scone
1. Keep your ingredients cold, particularly your butter. I will show you how to do this in the instructions.
2. Don’t over mix the dry and wet ingredients.
3. Use heavy whipping cream and cake flour.
Weird things you probably don’t have and need to get
- Cake flour (any grocery store)
- Heavy whipping cream
- Parchment paper
- Powdered sugar (for the glaze if you want)
- Blueberry preserve (also for the glaze)
Preparation
- Freeze a full stick of butter (at least 6 tablespoons)
- Chill your heavy whipping cream
- Purell your hands
Ingredients
- 2 cups cake flour
- 1/3 cup regular sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 6 tablespoons of very cold butter
- 1/2 cup of chilled whipping cream
- 1 egg (large)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
For the glaze
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 2 tablespoons whipping cream
- 2 tablespoons milk
- 1–2 tablespoons blueberry preserves
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
How to make delicious scones
- Preheat oven to 400
- Keep your butter
- In a large bowl, mix all your dry ingredients — flour, sugar, salt, baking powder
Add your butter like this: Pull your very cold butter out of your icy freezer. Grate the butter into the dry ingredients (use the big-holed side of a cheese grater), lightly stirring occasionally. Using a pastry blender, or a big spoon or whatever you can, press the butter into the dry ingredients as evenly spaced out as you can.
- Put your bowl with the dry ingredients and butter back into the freezer for 10 minutes.
- Add your wet ingredients — whipping cream, egg, vanilla extract.
Do the least when mixing. Do not use a hand mixer. Do not over mix. The second everything is mixed good enough and looks like dough you’re done.
- Place your dough on a floured surface and make it round and flat. Cut 4 slices.
- Place onto parchment paper and brush generously with whipping cream.
- Put the dough on parchment paper into the freezer for 15 minutes.
- Once out of the freezer, place your parchment paper with scones onto a baking sheet. Give some room in between them. Put in the oven.
- Cook around 20 minutes (these are big) but start checking at 17 minutes or so. The sides should look dry.
While the scones are cooking, let us make the glaze.
- In a bowl, mix the powdered sugar, milk, whipping cream, and vanilla extract.
- Add two tablespoons of blueberry preserves.
- The glaze should have the consistency of Gogurt. Add more sugar or whipping cream as needed to get that consistency.
Cooling down
- When the scones look done, pull them out and let cool for about 10min. You don’t want them to be fully room temp, just cooler than first pulling out the oven.
- Add the glaze on top buy just pouring it slowly from top center.
- Wait until room temperature.
Drink with coffee.
