I'm Jonesin' for Some Sconesin'

Welcome back! I'm just going to jump right in today. I'm suddenly obsessed with scones. I just want scones all the time. I'm currently sad because I have eaten all of my scones. I think this stems from the fact that my sister bought a Groupon for a high tea in a neighboring town and we had really high hopes for it and it ended up being just awful. We were there for two hours and could have consumed all we were given within 30 minutes (except for the cucumber and BUTTER sandwiches). Very poor service. So afterwards, I wanted scones and clotted cream that were actually good. Conveniently enough, I have a specialty shop near my house called UK Gourmet which is...exactly what it sounds like. It's a tiny, tiny store that is filled with magical things that I want to eat. On this particular visit though, I bought some scone mix and some clotted cream.

I won't actually talk about the scone mix (though it was pretty decent) except to say that the only reason I bought it was because my oven could only bake at 350 or 400 at the time. Now I have a fancy new oven that can bake at all the temperatures! And I still had a lot of clotted cream left so...more scones! This time I decided to bake them from scratch so I went to my handy dandy America's Test Kitchen Baking cookbook.

Since America's Test Kitchen is awesome, they test all the best ways to bake things so I trust them when they say that I should make the scones entirely in a food processor. And I even have one of those now! Yay! First step was to pulse together the dry ingredients a couple of times in the food processor. Flour explosion! I swear, I checked every connection and even had my sister confirm that yes, everything was locked but after every pulse, flour went flying out the sides. For some reason (I suspect that reason being that it was flour), I couldn't stop it from exploding. Oh well. I had to keep pulsing the dry ingredients with the butter too. In the future, I would just cut in the butter like a normal person instead of dirtying a whole food processor (and my counter). Then I had to move the dough to a bowl and mix in the heavy cream and currants. That actually went smoothly. This is actually a fairly easy recipe.

Now Test Kitchen gets a little weird here. They instructed me to press the dough into an 8 inch cake pan. Odd. But I obey! After pressing it into the cake pan, I had to flip it out of the pan and onto a cutting board. At this point, I was thinking that it would be difficult and sticky and pointless to use the pan but you know what? They were right. I ended up with a beautiful circle of dough of even thickness. Only thing left to do was to cut it into eighths and bake! About 15 minutes later, I was presented with some beautiful scones with which I could enjoy my clotted cream (and some tea, of course). I was warned by the cookbook to resist the urge to eat them immediately out of the oven but to let them cool completely so the texture would be right. Again, I obey and am rewarded. They were delicious. Just the right texture. Just the right sweetness. And so easy. All I've wanted to do since making these has been to make more of these. But then I'd just be eating scones for every meal and I suppose that would be unwise.

So, this wasn't exactly the baking challenge that I swore I'd be doing from now on but everyone needed to know about how yummy these scones are! Challenges on the horizon!

A Disney Moment: The Emperor's New Groove

Full disclosure: I've always liked this movie. Something about the way it breaks the 4^th wall all the time and has a certain sarcastic sensibility has always appealed to me. The narration is very self-reflective while still being humorous. Some of the jokes are overly corny and immature but they work on the brutish sidekick. Our evil villain is visually disturbing (a fact that the movie acknowledges and makes fun of) and somehow that kind of works. I enjoy it a lot so as we round out this group of five with a ranking of 2/5, I ask you…why do we even HAVE that lever? Squeak squeakum squeak squeak.