Adventures in Baking
My intention was to make lemon glazed triple berry scones from Baked Perfection but due to my inability to follow a recipe, I ended up with what you see above......and boy are they tasty!
Let me start at the beginning......
After two cookie recipes, I was ready to embark on a different type of baked good. I thought about a muffin, I thought about a cupcake and then I was on one of my favorite blogs and the word jumped out at me......scone. That was it.....that would be my next adventure. I've made scones before. From a bag of mix. From Harry and David. Never from scratch. There were several different flavors I could go with, but I could already taste the berry and lemon scone. The recipe didn't have a ton of ingredients and wouldn't be a large time commitment like dozens of cookies are. Score.
The Ingredients. A few days prior to baking day, I wrote out my grocery list and hit the store for the few ingredients I didn't have on hand. I needed to buy lemons, lemon juice, dried mixed berries and heavy cream Even as I was standing in front of the rows of fruit in the produce section my mind was thinking ahead to how little I would need to cut the pieces to go into the scone. I ended up buying fresh blueberries, raspberries and cherries. Duh.....dried fruit, not fresh fruit. Thinking back on it, I think my brain was picturing me washing and drying the fruit and cutting it up into little pieces, not actually purchasing fruit that has had it's life sucked out till it's all shriveled up and dried. It wasn't until I was actually gathering the ingredients right before I started making the scones that it hit me that fresh, clean, dry fruit wasn't what the recipe called for. Luckily, I had a little bag of cherry flavored dried cranberries I use on top of salads that were ready to step up to the plate.
Let's Get Started. Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, lemon zest, salt and dried berries. The zest worried me when I first read the recipe. I thought that was scraping the peel off the lemon, but I wanted to check with my Mom to make sure. Yep, scrap the peel with a long shaver tool. Now, even with my lack of baking skills you may be surprised (I know I was!) to find I had a zest tool in my kitchen. It has a little logo on the end says Food Magazine. I had a free years subscription to the magazine years ago and the zest tool must have came with it. I purchased two lemons at the store thinking the zest of one would be used for the scones and the other for the icing. The scone recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of zest. I now know that one lemon produces less than one tablespoon of zest. Not much I could do about that, they just weren't going to be as lemon-y.
Pour in heavy cream. Here's where I encountered my next problem. When I was at the store purchasing the ingredients, I wasn't exactly sure what heavy cream was.....who am I kidding, I still don't know what it is. I knew it would be in the dairy area, but I didn't see anything that only said Heavy Cream. The only thing that had the word 'heavy' was a little carton that said Heavy Whipping Cream. Now I was just confused. It wasn't like I was at some dinky little store, I was at a major supermarket. Are cream and whipping cream the same thing?? Does it turn 'heavy' when it's whipped?? What the heck. I looked around, maybe someone around here would know. What's with all the guys doing their grocery shopping tonight......doubt they know the difference, they look more like the beer and pizza type. Oh, here comes a couple with a loaded cart and she looks like she knows what she's doing with her list in hand........Uh oh, hubby just tried to set a gallon of milk on top of the potato chips......she is not happy....she's giving hubby the evil eye.....Yikes, better not interrupt that situation...Next solution, text mom. No answer. Well, guess I'll just go with the heavy whipping cream cause that's the only thing that looks remotely close.
Mix or knead by hand, just until combined. One other thing I completely forgot about in my quest for Heavy Cream was that the recipe calls for 1.25 cups. My little carton turned out to be 1 cup. One cup turns out to not be quite enough to mix with the flour mixture and make it all stick.
Mixture will be sticky. No kidding. Ick.
Flour surface. Divide dough into two sections, pat into two rounds, cut each round into pieces and place on a greased cookie sheet. At this point I was having some difficulty keeping the dough and cranberries stuck together and I was afraid it would get worse the more I worked with it. I separated it into two rounds, but didn't flatten them out too much and cut each into 4 pieces.
Bake 9-11 minutes and add the glaze.
Next step. The Glaze. OMGoodness. This is where the lemon flavor comes in. The glaze is simply powdered sugar, lemon juice and zest. I somehow managed to squirt a little bit of lemon juice in my eye while trying to open the container. Never a dull moment around here I tell ya.
The clean-up. Well, I didn't use a mixer and still managed to make a mess with the flour. Even with my veering off the recipe, these scones are Gooooooood! Flavorful, especially with the glaze ( I may have added a wee bit more lemon juice than it called for to make up for the shortage of zest!) and decently moist for a scone. I went ahead and glazed the remaining seven and covered the plate with saran wrap. I wasn't sure if they'd stay fresh very long but I just had one tonight for dessert and, in my opinion, they're better today, three days later, than they were on Sunday when they were fresh out of the oven.
On the next episode of Adventure in Baking. I'm a little ahead of the game this week. We're supposed to finally get our first measurable snow tomorrow so I've already picked out my treat for this weekend and purchased what I needed from the store tonight. You'll have to check back next week to see what gooey confection I decided upon, but here's a little tease........red velvet.......it's probably not what you're thinking so be sure to stop back by!
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