Tag

scones

Chamomile Tea Scones

written by Ali

For the 30th edition of Novel Food, I opted to make chamomile tea scones. I wasn’t sure I was going to make a recipe by the deadline for this edition of Novel Food. The move, the new job, and so on, have cut into both reading and blogging time. Fortunately, I had a bit of a break this weekend and had the bonus day off on the 4th of July, so have been catching up on a lot of things, including reading and cooking. One of my favorite “cute” mystery series is Laura Childs’s tea shop series, featuring intrepid heroine Theodosia Browning. I adore Theodosia, with her blue eyes and her unruly auburn hair. She has a great dog (Earl Grey) and runs a perfect little tea shop in Charleston, SC. And of course, she keeps running into dead bodies and has to lend a hand to the local law enforcement to figure out whodunnit.

Yep – these books are a bit contrived. But they are an awesome palate cleanser to what I’ve been reading lately: Jo Nesbo’s latest featuring poor Harry Hole, who can be pretty despondent; the most recent JD Robb, filled with a fair amount of violence; and a paperback by Kate Slaughter – also kind of dark. It was definitely time for a little break, so I bought the two most recent Laura Childs’s paperbacks: Devonshire Scream and Ming Tea Murder. My inspiration for my chamomile tea scones actually comes from Devonshire Scream. In addition to running a great tea shop, Theodosia employees a spectacular baking chef named Haley, who keeps whipping up the most divine scones. Between scones and tea, I couldn’t help eyeing my lovely chamomile crop out in the garden and thinking, hmm, what could I make?

These chamomile tea scones are light and fruity. They make use of the whole chamomile flower, and if you are like me, and a bit too lazy to dry them for tea, make great use of an edible flower. Plus, they would be great being served aside a cup of tea – chamomile or other.

Now, I generally don’t share candid behind the scene photos on my blog posts, but couldn’t resist sharing what I’m calling the cat catastrophe.

First photo there is a shot of me trying to set up the scene to photo these scones. Initially, I only had one cat helping (not unusual). But then, our ancient calico, Carmen, decided she needed to supervise. Supervision meant sitting observing from the cat tree. And then it involved sniffing the chamomile. Which then led to attacking the chamomile, getting a claw hung up in the napkin, and knocking over the tea cup and drenching everything. Really – not helpful. I mopped it all up and started over. Fortunately, the chamomile tea scones were all unharmed. The cat was totally unashamed. She sashayed over to the couch and finished supervising.

Yum

Chamomile Tea Scones

Ingredients

2 1/3 cups flour
¼ cup sugar
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup butter
½ cup milk
1 egg
2 tablespoons sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup finely chopped chamomile flowers

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
In a medium bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Cut the butter into slices. Add the butter into the dry mixture and either use a pastry cutter or your hands to incorporate the butter until it forms pea size chunks. Add the milk, egg, sour cream and vanilla and gently incorporate until all the flour/butter mixture is wet and sticks together in a shaggy dough. Add the chopped chamomile flowers and gently incorporate.
Turn the dough out onto a parchment lined baking sheet and form into a circle. Cut the dough into twelve pieces that radiate out from the middle of the circle. Gently separate each piece – you want just a bit of space between each scone so that they can rise.
Bake for 20-25 minutes or until the tops of the scones are golden brown.
Makes 12. Enjoy!

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This recipe is linked up to Novel Food #30. Hop on over to check out all the great literature inspired recipes.

This post is also linked up to Treat Petite for July 2017.

July 5, 2017 10 comments

Baked Goods Breakfast

Biscuits and Gravy with Cacio e Pepe Scones

written by Ali

If you are looking for a post-Thanksgiving brunch recipe that doesn’t involve turkey, look no further than biscuits and gravy with cacio e pepe scones.

For some years, I’ve wanted to make the perfect biscuit, which is basically the biscuit of nostalgia – the biscuit that my grandmother used to make. I watched her make biscuits for years: in fact, my first cooking experiments were rolling out a bit of biscuit dough and adding sprinkles and other oddball ingredients to them. My grandma would dutifully bake these biscuit cookies along with the biscuits for dinner and I’m sure that my grandfather equally dutifully would eat and praise them. For as long as I watched, though, I don’t actually remember what ingredients she used.

My husband, Clay, experiences the same nostalgia. He has a biscuit memory from his grandma’s cooking, which we haven’t been able to pinpoint or reproduce, though we’ve tried. I realized, though, after making scones some time ago that my scone recipe is remarkably biscuit like: light, fluffy, and buttery. I’ve wanted to try out a savory scone/biscuit and then make gravy.

So this weekend, make up a batch of cacio e pepe scones and smother them in sausage and gravy – you won’t be disappointed and I think both our grandmothers would approve.

Biscuits and Gravy with Cacio e Pepe Scones

Cacio e Pepe Scones
Makes 12 scones

2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper
1/2 cup butter
1 cup shredded Parmesan cheese, Pecorino Romano or similar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 egg

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and black pepper. Cut the butter into slices. Add the butter into the dry mixture and either use a pastry cutter or your hands to incorporate the butter until it forms pea size chunks. Add the cheese and mix it in. Add the heavy cream and egg gently incorporating until all the flour/butter mixture is wet and sticks together in a shaggy dough.

Turn the dough out onto a parchment lined baking sheet and form into a circle. Cut the dough into twelve pieces that radiate out from the middle of the circle. Gently separate each piece – you want just a bit of space between each scone so that they can rise.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until the tops of the scones are golden brown. These can be frozen and reheated wrapped in aluminum foil at 350 degrees for about thirty minutes.

Cream Gravy with Sausage
Serves 4

6 links cooked sausage, cut into small pieces.
1 tablespoon drippings from the cooked sausage
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 cup milk
Black pepper to taste

Heat the drippings and oil over medium heat in a small saucepan. Add the flour a bit at a time, whisking constantly. The flour may clump a bit and that’s fine. Once all the flour is incorporated, add the milk slowly, continuing to whisk. Bring to a low simmer and cook until the gravy begins to thicken. Stir the entire time to keep the milk from burning. When the gravy is to your preferred consistency, take off the heat and add the sausage.

Serve the cream gravy with sausage over one or more Cacio e Pepe scones, split in half. Enjoy!

This post is linked to Cook Once Eat Twice November at Searching for Spice. Check out the other great recipes!

November 25, 2016 2 comments

Appetizers Baked Goods Breakfast Holiday Recipes

Cacio e Pepe Scones

written by Ali

Cacio e Pepe scones are my contribution to Food’n Flix this month. Food’n Flix is a fun blogging opportunity to watch the same movie as other amazing food bloggers and be inspired. This month’s movie, Burnt, was hosted by Caroline Makes. Burnt is an absolutely quintessential cooking movie about a burned out chef who makes a major come back and finds love and inspiration along the way.

The first time I watched Burnt was on an airplane on my I-Pad on the way to Indianapolis a few weeks ago. I thought that creating food inspired from this movie would be easy – it’s a movie about a chef and about food, after all, so how hard could it be? After watching the movie through the first time, I realized it was going to be more challenging than I’d originally thought. There are so many fast paced camera shots of all the food that the main character Adam, played by Bradley Cooper, plates, serves, and eats that I couldn’t quite figure out what was actually being cooked. Then I was distracted by the plot line and found myself more engaged with the drama between the characters than the food. So I watched the movie a second time this past week while I was in Chicago, pen and notebook in hand. It provided a great distraction from all the real-world drama that was going on with the US election. So much beautiful food: seared shrimp, bouillabaisse, summer vegetables on ricotta cheese, turbot, beets, oysters, omelettes, mushrooms, beef, lamb. But my favorite food moment in the film is at the very start when Adam suggests adding chopped sage to a luscious looking bowl of cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper pasta). I got to thinking about the combination of cheese and black pepper and then even more about food and how it can bring such comfort – whether one is taking care of a chef who has gone on a binge by cooking a simple omelette or if one is just trying to recover from the election hangover. I love cheese and black pepper and I love scones, so decided to see what would happen if I combined these elements.

I have to say that I’m very pleased with how these scones turned out. I even went digging through the pantry to find a jar of tomato jam I made last year to see how it would taste on a scone (it’s delicious). These are so creamy they are nearly biscuit like, so I’m pretty sure we are going to make some sausage gravy next weekend and warm up a few scones in lieu of biscuits. I also think these would be great with a glass of a robust red wine as a holiday appetizer.

Cacio e Pepe Scones
Makes 12 scones

2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper
1/2 cup butter
1 cup shredded Parmesan cheese, Pecorino Romano or similar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 egg

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until the tops of the scones are golden brown. Enjoy!

November 14, 2016 17 comments

Baked Goods Breakfast Farmer's Market

Pear and Chocolate Scones

written by Ali

These pear and chocolate scones came about because I drank a cup of Earl Grey tea the other afternoon and decided that my next cup of tea needed to be accompanied by scones. That, and, through a moment of marital miscommunication at Trader Joe’s last weekend, we ended up with two boxes of butter, two dozen eggs, and two containers of heavy cream, which neither of us realized until we were home and unloading the groceries. Fortunately, scones use heavy cream, eggs, and butter and even more fortunate still, it was a rainy and gloomy weekend, which made it perfect for scone experimentation.

I also bought pears, which are a somewhat ambivalent fruit for me. I like pears and I feel obligated to buy them in the fall. Unfortunately, I often forget that they are lurking in the fridge (though I recently read they shouldn’t be stored in the fridge at all), and end up with pear mush. This time of year, I see all the lovely pear recipes – pear galettes, pear tarts, fancy whole pears in cakes – and think, this will be the year I make something fancy with pears.

I don’t know that these scones exactly fit the bill of fanciness with pear. However, they are a good start in that direction and may inspire me to break out the rough puff pastry next week and cook up some pastry laden pears. In the meantime, these go really well with a cup of coffee, as well as with a cup of tea. They were fairly quick to put together, too, and can last a few days in an airtight container, so make a great morning-at-work snack.

(I didn’t mean to cut these as crazily as I did – I was aiming for mini-scones and went off the rails. My advice – make the cuts like you would for a pizza.)

Pear and Chocolate Scones
Serves 12

2 cups flour
¼ cup sugar
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup butter
½ cup heavy cream
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 pear, chopped into small pieces
½ cup dark chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Cut the butter into slices. Add the butter into the dry mixture and either use a pastry cutter or your hands to incorporate the butter until it forms pea size chunks. Add the heavy cream, egg and vanilla and gently incorporate until all the flour/butter mixture is wet and sticks together in a shaggy dough. Add the pear and chocolate chips and gently incorporate.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until the tops of the scones are golden brown. Enjoy!

September 20, 2016 0 comment