When you stumble upon a recipe that promises to fill your house with the warm scent of strawberries and cake, and berry-stained fingers afterward, you can’t say no, or pretend to be uninterested and click on to the next page. I definitely couldn’t. These strawberry scones lingered in my memory for two whole days and by saturday evening, I had a block of butter and a punnet of strawberries in the fridge waiting to be elevated into something even more glorious.
This isn’t the first time I’ve shared a recipe that a recipe that marries berries and pastry, but what can I say? Some things don’t change, especially when they are very, very good.
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Had been feeling off-centre all week — my work requires me to do some serious planning and travelling to conduct clinical interviews and focus groups. So when I’m not stressed out with the organising and being on my best professional behaviour, my thoughts are often in a madcap frenzy. You’ll know this if you tried to have a decent conversation with me this week…did not happen.
And so, I’ve learned something about myself. When I’m too moody to read, write, cook or create something, most of the time those things are exactly what I need. Making these scones brought me back to springtime in Davis where there was always a new recipe being tested in our little kitchen, and overflowing amounts of goodness and love to go around. Anna & Nicole, these are for you.
There’s nothing to them, no need for any fussy machinery. You toss some chopped strawberries into flour that’s had some butter cut into it, stir in some cream, knead it once or twice to form a sticky ball of dough, and then form them into little rounds.
On a floured surface, I cut out the biscuits using the rim of a small glass to the very satisfying sqelchy sounds of strawberries encased in dough. This recipe is heavy on fruit and as a result, there are fewer actual scone bits to go around. This makes them much lighter, more fragrant, and…
…gives you these unbelievable pools of bubbly strawberry jam, already built-in and baked right into the biscuit. BEST. PART!!
Field Notes:
Original recipe by Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen. I stayed pretty close to the recipe but I would adapt a couple of things for Singaporean tastes:
– This isn’t mentioned in the Smitten Kitchen post, but I got 26 scones after doubling the recipe. It took me a little while to cut in the butter and form the dough, but I believe this should be much more manageable if you just make a single batch.
– The berries we get here are a good size, but tend to not be so sweet. If you’re not iffy about sugar, I would let the chopped berries sit for a little while in a bit of sugar (as fine-grained as you can get) but not increase the amount of sugar that goes into the dry mixture. I think Korean strawberries would work well but they are more delicate, appearance-wise.
– The original recipe calls for heavy cream, which is the same thing as double cream in our local grocery stores. Not only is it selectively stocked in certain supermarkets, but it is also expensive. Instead, I used a cup of single cream and a cup of cream substitute (which was slightly less thick than the single cream), and they turned out just fine ;)
retrospectif: a notebook 