The eighth recipe in the Modern Baker Challenge is Real Welsh Scones. This was a wonderfully simple recipe, and even a sleepyhead like me found it easy to mix these up for breakfast on a Sunday morning.
First, I placed all the dry ingredients in the food processor and added cold butter.
I pulsed the mixture about eight to 10 times, until it resembled a fine powder.
After beating the egg and milk together, I added them to the dry mixture in a bowl and stirred it all together.
I kneaded the dough a few times to incorporate all the flour and mix in the butter pieces. The dough was a little crumbly but held together OK as I divided it into two pieces, patted them into rounds, and scored them with a dough scraper.
I baked the scones in for 12 minutes, the minimum time recommended by the recipe. When I took them out, they looked like this:
I cut into one and found it to be a bit underdone. The scones were nicely browned, and I was worried that if I continued to bake them, they would get overdone on the outside. Since I had already turned off the oven, I put the scones back in and baked them using the residual heat. This is a technique known as baking in a “reducing oven”. Often this is done by preheating the oven to a high temperature, say 500 degrees, then reducing the temperature to 450 or so when you put the bread in the oven. In my case, the oven was turned off, and I baked the scones for about five more minutes, at which point they were perfectly baked.
The finished scones were delicious. They had a slight sweetness from the sugar, and they were perfect with a little marmalade and a cup of coffee.
This is yet another great recipe from The Modern Baker. I know that all cookbooks have some recipes that are better than others, and even the best of them have a few recipes that not everyone will like. But so far, I have loved everything I’ve made from this book. And so have my family and friends.