scones

I love scones.  They taste amazing.  Especially with chocolate chips (like these) or fruit in them.  The whole family loves them.  If I make them with whole wheat flour I can lie to myself that they are healthy.  Plus, they are sooo easy to make.  I really don't think it is humanly possible to screw these up.  I mean, unless you are a total spaz and switched the sugar out with salt by accident or something...

This is my all time favorite scone recipe.  It is fool proof and always gets compliments.  All you need is milk, salt, baking powder, flour, vanilla, butter, sugar, and eggs.

Mix all your ingredients together at once.  This is one of the only recipes I mix by hand instead of using my beloved stand mixer.  The stand mixer makes the scones light and fluffy, and mixing by hand makes them denser and, well, more scone like.

You can leave them plain as vanilla scones, or mix in chocolate chips once the other ingredients are fully incorporated.  Yum!

I looove my cast iron scone pan, but it isn't necessary.  You can always use a cookie scoop on a prepped cookie pan.

Bake 8-12 minutes, until the edges are lightly golden.  The smell delicious!

ingredients:

2 C AP flour (or whole wheat, or half AP-whole wheat)

1/4 C granulated sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

6 tbsp unsalted butter, softened

1/2 C chocolate chips (or fruit), optional

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 milk

2 eggs

directions:

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

2.  Seriously just dump everything but the chocolate chips together in a medium sized bowl and stir with a wooden spoon until just mixed.  Then stir in chocolate chips.  You don't want to over mix this.  This is pretty much the only recipe I have requiring stirring that I do in a standard bowl instead of my kitchenaid.  They just turn out better this way.

3.  There are a few options for baking the scones.  You can use a prepared scone pan like me (yeah, I'm probably one of the only people on the planet who use one, but I loove mine!), use a cookie scoop to place individual scones on a prepared cookie sheet, or place the dough in an 8" circle on a prepared cookie sheet and cut into 8 wedges and separate. Makes 8-16 scones depending on which method you bake them.

4. Bake 8-12 minutes, or until tops are lightly golden.

These are great to eat warm or cold.  

Any recipes that says to use vanilla I use this vanilla paste.  Seriously, its so fantastic you could eat it with a spoon.  It isn't actually so much a paste as a syrup, and it gives your food those little french vanilla black specks.  Also, this doesn't have that nasty alcoholic scent that some cheap vanilla extracts have.  If you try this, you will never want to go back to using extract (you use the same amount of each, tsp for tsp).  The only downside is that this costs a bit more.  I personally think it is worth it.  I buy most of my dry baking supplies in WinCos bulk section, so I figure the cost evens out anyway.  

If you do want to use this paste, you can usually find it at fancy kitchen stores like Williams-Sonoma, or even on amazon.com.