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30 Nov 2010

Scone anyone?

Today was my little chefs and her rather not so young apprentices' first attempt at making scones. How hard could it be anyway?

Some self-raising flour.. check
Plain flour... check
Milk... haha got that covered!
Butter... umm, will margarine do?

Well once all the ingredients were lined up we were ready to go, following a recipe from the internet. 

Put the oven at 200ºC, easy. I had the head Chef lightly dust a flat baking tray with some flour or was that supposed to be the self-raising? No, no, plain flour ok... why not both?

Then sift, sift? 3 cups of Self-raising flour into a large bowl then add 80grams of butter, cubed. This is where there is a halt in production as the now confused Apprentice firstly needs to find out how many cups of margarine would be equivalent to 80 grams of butter, cubed no less, whatever that may be.

OK success after scouring the net for an approximation I discovered that 2/3 of a cup should suffice, me thinks. So in goes the margarine, low in salt in fact, and the fun begins as both the self-raising and faux butter have to be mixed with what will be, tiny fingers.

It said to mix these until it resembles breadcrumbs unfortunately after about 10 minutes it still resembled flour and margarine in bits, here and there. Not a problem! I'll add more 'butter' and flour as obviously they got it wrong, I know better.


Now with a little help from longer fingers we were getting the desired consistency. As I said, I know better! Phew!

I hadn't noticed at first but then, I saw that my child had changed colour. What was a fair child yet with slightly olive complexion seated before me, was now something resembling a Yeti. No wonder we had to add more 'butter' and flour as a majority of the flour had migrated on to la pâtissière's arms, hands, face and clothes.

Now, once I had had a laugh, we continued. It was time to make a well at the centre of the breadcrumb looking mixture and to that add 1 cup of milk. The only thing was every time I made a so called well my little dump truck refilled my hole. After the fourth attempt the apprentice mutinied. I took control of the bowl until I had the indent completed. It was then that I handed back the helm and Amelie added the milk and the fun started again, with hands at the ready we mixed until I realised there was a side note which was, to mix with a flat bladed knife, ( aren't all knives, flat bladed?). Well no wonder it was extremely difficult to blend as it was like glue sticking to our fingers and hands.

All under control again. It was getting there and we transferred our dough onto the flat tray. We commenced kneading and then we argued as to who would knead.    I lost.

2cm thick the dough should be, Great! Where's a ruler? Ah found one. Cm not inches! I turn it around.
Next we had to use a 5cm (diameter) round cutter, cut out 12 rounds. Couldn't find one, will a fried egg holder thingy work? Of course, it's so obviously round and so what if it's 8cm in diameters. So what if it's 8cm.. oh! We got 6 scones out of our mixture instead of the 12 we were supposed to.

Oh well into the oven they went and the result...


I reckon they were Delicious, home-made Scones... and twice the size for the same price.


What do you think?

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a lovely blog and some yummy looking scones!

Papercut Doll said...

Making me hungry :) Lovely pic of flour basted Amelie too oxox

alejandro guzman said...

Thanks SJ. they were big enough to share.

Hello mylifinscones and thank you. I'll have to check your site out to get more ideas. Cheers.

We had the ingredients and there was some method in the madness.

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