Just so you don’t get any funny ideas, I don’t get any sort of promotional consideration from King Arthur Flour (though I wish I did… Hey – KA .. need me to test anything? 🙂 I’d be delighted to…)
I order flour and other things from King Arthur Flour fairly regularly. A couple of orders ago, I got a free Cream Tea Scone Mix for ordering more than $50 or $60 worth of stuff. The mix sat on my shelf for awhile, as I’m not a big mix person or a big scone person. Finally, I made them at xmas time when Jodie and Ian came to visit. They were nothing short of fantastic. Delicious, moist, light-textured. No trace of the sawdust doorstops so many scones are. I’d been dreaming of ways to replicate them, since a $7 mix can’t be a staple in my house.

I found a recipe for Cream Scones with Currants in Baking Illustrated Here’s the recipe with my modifications.

Cream Scones (no currants)
2 cups unbleached AP flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
3 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
5 Tbsp cold butter, cut in to cubes
1 C heavy cream

Preheat your oven to 425F and set your rack in the middle of the oven.
Put flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in the workbowl of your food processor. Process with several 1-second pulses.
Remove the cover and distribute the butter evenly over the flour. Cover and process with 12 1-second pulses. Add in the heavy cream and do several short pulses until the dough begins to form.
Transfer the dough to a countertop and knead the dough by hand until it comes together into a rough, slightly sticky ball, 5 to 10 seconds.

The original recipe says to cut the scones into 8 wedges. I wanted small, round scones so I used a biscuit cutter to cut them out. This was not a great plan. I should have added in some more flour when I was kneading or something, because they were a big sticky mess to cut out into rounds. Big sticky mess.

Place the scones on an ungreased baking sheet . If you have some pearl sugar, it makes a nice decoration on top. Bake until scone tops are light brown, 12-15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack for at least 15 minutes.

They tasted great, were nice and light, but the dough wasn’t as easy to deal with as the Cream Tea Scone Mix dough. If I want scones that are easy to cut out, I’ll have to keep playing around a bit. I think I’ll give this recipe another try but I’ll go with the more standard triangle shape.

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