Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Cheese Scones


Recently I bought a new recipe book which is a breast cancer research fundraiser, but is full of the favourite baking recipes of well known NZ cooks. It is a lovely book and has some great recipes. I decided on Sunday to make the cheese scone recipe for lunch. I absolutely love cheese scones, but I have never really been a great scone maker.

This scone recipe is not your usual in that it contains an egg. In some ways this made the scones a little more like cheese puffs than cheese scones as they were very light. They also had buttermilk in them. When we came back from three months travelling round Europe five years ago, I always had buttermilk in the fridge, as our trip had included time bike touring round Ireland and I became addicted to Irish soda bread. The Irish soda bread recipe I was given by the owner of the B & B we stayed in in Tralee, included buttermilk – hence having it in the fridge. These days I don’t make as much bread and when a recipe calls for buttermilk I often add a tablespoon of white vinegar to a cup of milk and let it sour. This is what I did on Sunday.

I made two thirds of the following recipe (using just the egg yolk rather than the whole egg) and it made 6 large cheese scones. They were delicious both hot from the oven and even once cooled later on in the day. They all got eaten before I could see whether they would have survived until the next day, although I think scones are always better on the day made and preferably hot from the oven.



Cheese Scones (adapted from a Treasury of NZ Baking)

3 c self raising flour
½ tsp mustard powder
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
25g butter
100g grated tasty cheese
1 1/2c buttermilk (or sour your own milk by using my method above)
1 egg

• Combine flour, mustard powder and cayenne pepper
• Grate in butter and rub with fingers, stir in cheese
• Combine milk and egg
• Pour milk into a well in the middle of the flour and then us a knife to bring the dough together
• Pat out on a well floured bench and cut into scones. Sprinkle tops with a little more grated cheese
• Bake at 220c fanbake for 12 minutes

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Johnny said...

Fantastic, I'm gonna try these out. Am trying to get a scone recipe that works for me. I've never fully mastered the scone so far!

Kiwicakes said...

Oh these sound so good, I have been searching for the ultimate cheese scone recipe, I will have to try these.

Cakelaw said...

These scones look good - it's nearly lunchtime and I am starving, so one of these would be welcome right now.

Morven said...

I want this book!

My scones are usually like bricks and I wonder if I'd have more success with an eggy recipe. Hmmmm

TeaLady said...

UUUMMM!!!! Cheese scones. Yum!

rebelwithoutakitchen said...

Hey Tammy - How are you????? Here's a question for you - is a scone still a scone if it has an egg in it? There was a recipe on Masterchef recently - best date scones - lo and behold - secret ingredient - an egg - I think the art of scones is achieving that lightness sans egg! Nut then I have always been a purist - Lynleyx

SassyCassie said...

I don't really like scones, but those sound yummy!