Mary Berry’s Very Best Scones – success!

Scones

 Mary Berry's Baking Bible cover

It’s no secret that I’ve attempted to bake scones many many times and so often they come out resembling hockey pucks, or the stone that we used to play hopscotch when we were kids, or as we call it in Scotland ‘peever’. I was quite happy with the lemon and poppy seed scones that I baked earlier this year, but I really want just plain scones, for eating with my home-made jams, and cream on high days. So in the spirit of try try again I decided to try Mary Berry’s Very Best Scones recipe from the book Mary Berry’s Baking Bible. They turned out to be very tasty and actually better than any shop bought ones which can be quite doughy and damp.

450 g (1 lb) self-raising flour
2 rounded teaspoons of baking powder
75g (3 oz) softened butter
50g (2 oz) caster sugar (I used ordinary white sugar)
2 large eggs
about 225 ml (8 fl oz milk)

1. Pre heat the oven to 220 C / Fan 200 C / 428 F / Gas 7. Lightly grease two baking trays.

2. Measure the flower and baking powder into a large bowl. Add the butter and rub it in with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar.

3. Beat the eggs together and make up to 300 ml (1/2 a pint) with the milk, put about two tablespoons of the mixture aside in a cup for glazing the scones later. Gradually add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients, stirring it until you have a soft dough. The mixture should be quite wet, sticking to your fingers as then they will rise better.

4. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and roll it out to a thickness of 1-2 cm (1/2 or 3/4 inches). Use a 2 inch fluted cutter to stamp out the scones, pushing straight down into the dough but avoiding twisting it. Keep gathering the dough together and rolling it out until it’s all used up.

5. Arrange on the greased and warmed baking trays and brush with the reserved egg mixture to glaze. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 10-15 minutes until well risen and golden. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

These scones are really delicious with butter or jam and even better with cream I’m sure.

I had a measuring tape out to make sure that I wasn’t rolling the dough out too thin, it was only then that I realised that neither of my scone cutters are 2 inches in diameter, mine are 2.5 and 3 inches in diameter. So I expect these scones to turn out even better when I can make them the correct size. I made 15 scones, but it should have been 20 if I had had the right size of cutter.

Lemon and Poppy Seed Scones

lemon and poppy seed scones2

I’ve not had a lot of success with my scone baking in the past, in fact they could be used as hockey pucks as they are generally so solid and dry but when a friend of mine raved about lemon and poppy seed scones from a nearby tearoom I decided to have a bash at them. Jack thinks that the browner scones looked overdone, I think they were supposed to be paler but they all tasted fine. I gave some to a friend and she says they tasted even better toasted – it enhances the lemon flavour – I’d never thought of toasting scones before.

I found a recipe online, but tweaked it a wee bit by adding a few drops of lemon essence to the lemon juice as for me there’s no possibility of something tasting too lemony. I’ve baked these scones twice now and they’ve worked perfectly, but I’m in two minds about the poppy seeds. They don’t add any flavour I believe but obviously add texture. They have a tendency to get stuck in your teeth though. I happened to have a packet of poppy seeds anyway but when they are finished I don’t know if I would bother buying more, I might prefer the scones without them. The ingredients below make 20 scones so you might want to halve the quantities.

900g self-raising flour
225g margarine
85g sugar
30g poppy seeds
zest of 1 lemon
juice of 1 lemon
a few drops of lemon essence
2 eggs
333ml milk

Mix the self-raising flour, margarine, sugar, poppy seeds, lemon juice and lemon essence in a bowl and rub together until the mix resembles fine breadcrumbs. Then add the eggs and milk and mix to a dough.

Tip the dough out onto a floured surface and roll out to a thickness of 4 cm or 1.5 inches, cut into rounds using a 70 mm/ 2.75″ (ish) cutter. Put them onto a baking tray. Brush with milk ( I missed this bit out as I used my pastry brush for a DIY project a while ago!)

Put into the middle of a pre-heated oven at 160 Centigrade for 20 minutes. Gas mark 3, or Fahrenheit 325.

Delicious with butter but for a super lemon experience why not try lemon curd.