Scones

Saved by the Scones

Recipes

This week my workload had a bit of an upward spike, that sort of 17-hours-in-front-of-a-laptop type spike. Tuesday was the worst, I finally finished my shift at 2am on Wednesday morning and crawled under a duvet on the sofa in the office as I didn’t want to wake my housemates. Even though I’m pretty certain there isn’t a cricket bat in our house my sleepy logic made me believe that if I was heard climbing the stairs at that hour someone would be sure to mistake me for a burglar and hit me over the head with one.

The rest of Wednesday was almost a total right-off. I’m sure when I was a student I could have only a handful of hours sleep and still be functional the next day but not now, stringing a sentence together yesterday was a serious chore. What happened?!

In the end the only thing to revive me from my zombie-like state were a couple of scones and a double espresso.

I had a just about enough energy to whip these up and it was well worth it. I had some clotted cream left over from a recipe photoshoot at the weekend (as you do) so it would have been rude not to use it up!

Oaty Scones

(makes about 12)

350g strong white bread flour
50g of rolled oats
pinch of salt
3 teaspoons of baking powder
2 dessertspoons of golden caster sugar
85g of butter
juice of half a lemon
180ml milk
2 eggs

1) Preheat the oven to 200°C and line a large baking sheet with a piece of greaseproof paper

2) Stir the dry ingredients together in a bowl and then rub in the butter until it looks like fine breadcrumbs

3) Add the lemon juice to the milk. Add the eggs to the milk mixture and stir with a fork to combine.

4) Pour the liquid ingredients onto the dry ones and stir together

5) Tip out onto a well floured surface and knead just briefly to make sure all the ingredients are combined. Flatten the dough, just with your hands is fine (I couldn’t be bothered with a rolling pin yesterday) it should be about 4-5cm thick then cut into circles with a cutter. You don’t have to make them round, my mum used to cut them into triangles just with a table knife, there was something very clever and mathematical about her reasons for doing this but I just remember them being yummy.

6) Put them on the prepared baking sheet, evenly spaced (they expand a little bit) and bake for about 10mins

7) Serve warm with jam and clotted cream!

20120802-180526.jpg

Since uploading this photo on facebook & twitter a debate has started as to whether the cream goes first or the jam, I’m all for the jam going first as it keeps the cream nice and cold on the warm scone but other people fiercely disagree with me stating that the cream should be first. What do you think?

Jubi-picnic!

Cooking, Events

My Jubilee Weekend

I am slightly ashamed to say that with all the meetings, recipe testing and business planning I almost entirely forgot about the 4 day weekend of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Luckily I was prompted just in time when my good pal Helen asked if I would like to go to a street party on Sunday.

Still keen to stick to my healthier ways I whipped up a light, wholesome Jubilee Picnic ready to share at whichever East London bash that would be willing to let us pull up a plastic chair.

I made coronation chicken skewers using free range chicken breasts, yellow peppers and dried fruit, served with a dip made from Greek yoghurt, curry powder, coriander and lemon juice.

20120605-163233.jpg
For a more whole-food cucumber sandwich I used rye bread filled with quark, cucumber and dill.20120605-163416.jpg

And as a sweet treat I made some Lemon & Lavender Drizzle Cake & Portmary Scones (both from Harry Eastwood’s book) which were lovely.

20120605-164012.jpg

I felt a royal picnic would not be complete without a little Pimm’s but instead of Lemonade I used Perrier to mix which isn’t half bad and much kinder on the teeth!

20120605-164021.jpg

We decided to head to London Fields as we thought that there was a good chance that Broadway Market or Columbia Road Market (both pretty much side by side) would be having some kind of shin dig. No such luck. Broadway Market was empty and Columbia Road had it’s usual Flower Market, which is always nice (and one of the flower sellers made a fuss of Helen’s bowler hat) but it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. Just as we were about to give up hope we heard the “thud thud thud” of some exciting music and tried to work out where it was coming from. This was the final nail in the coffin that was our street party hunt as the music in question was coming from the boot speakers of a parked car next to an unmanned barbecue and a small bouncy castle complete with a single kid. I’m sure this street party livened up later on but at this point we were cold and damp from the drizzle so lugged our picnic back to Helen’s flat.

This turned out to be the best decision; Helen’s flat has bunting, hot coffee and a TV on which we could watch the live broadcast of all the celebratory boats sailing down the Thames and all the rain was outside 🙂

Happy Bank Holiday x

20120605-164556.jpg