Nigella's Scones

Nigella's Scones
Home Cooking



I hadn't baked anything in a while. It's not a great feeling because I find delight in baking. To break my baking drought, I decided on something really easy to get the skills in check.

Scones are not new to this blog. I should probably have a special category just for scones. Oh wait, I do :D.

Vegetable shortening

The recipe I went for is from Nigella Lawson's "How to be a Domestic Goddess". It is one of my favorite cookbooks and trust me, I own a lot. Her recipe is titled 'Lilly's scones' and I chose it because of its use of vegetable shortening. For some reason, I had vegetable shortening in the fridge, completely unopened so I thought 'Yes! Finally I can use it for something'.

I made the full quantity of scones so the recipe is exact from the book.


Lily's Scones from Nigella Lawson's "How to be a Domestic Goddess"
Makes 12 scones

Ingredients:

• 3 and 1/3 cup plain flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 4 and 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
• 1/4 cup cold unsalted butter, diced
• 2 tbsp vegetable shortening, in teaspooned lumps
• 1 and 1/3 cup milk
• 1 large egg, beaten for egg-wash

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius.
2. Sift the flour, salt, baking soda, and cream of tartar into a large bowl.
3. Rub in the fats till the mixture goes like damp sand.4. Add the milk all at once, mix briefly (be careful not to over mix) and then turn out onto a floured surface and knead lightly to form a dough.5. Roll out to about 2.5cm to 3cm thickness. Dip the cutter into some flour, then stamp out at least 10 scones. You get 12 in all from this, but may need to reroll for the last 2 (I actually made 16).6. Place on the baking sheet very close together – the idea is that they bulge and stick together on cooking
7. Brush the tops with the egg wash. Put in the oven and cook for 10 minutes or until risen and golden.8. Always eat freshly baked, preferably still warm from the oven, with clotted cream and jam.


I might just be reporting my first baking failure in a long, long time. Normally I don't even bother blogging them but these looked OK, just tasted poorly. I followed the recipe quite precisely so I'm not sure what went wrong.

Problems:

1. The scones didn't rise much
2. They had a really awful sour flavor that was impossible to ignore
3. The texture was more bread-like than scone like

Scone texture (doesn't look so bad on camera)

I admit that I didn't use a proper measuring teaspoon but from my experience in baking scones, they are usually not THAT picky about quantities. I have baked many successful batches without measurements, instead feeling for the correct consistency.

A few theories:

1. I may have put too much cream of tartar
2. Not enough baking powder?
3. Didn't bake for long enough
4. Instead of putting the circles of scone batter in the formation I used (see pics above to know what I mean), I should have fitted each subsequent row into the gaps from the above row so that they bunched better

In any case, these scones were bordering on inedible. I did a Google search to see if I was alone in my failure and apparently, I am! Everyone else reports that these scones are worth the effort so... sorry guys, I don't know.

My scone pudding creation

I ended up salvaging my poorly creation by using them in a impromptu bread and butter style pudding. I beat together some egg, milk and sugar and poured it over some scone halves that were covered in jam. This was baked in an oven until bubbling and set. I poured over some homemade custard too. As inedible as the scones were on their own, they were quite delicious in pudding form. The moral of the story? A bit of creativity allows you to get away with certain disasters.