Scones are my favorite breakfast pastries. Sorry muffins and doughnuts, you just don’t stand a chance. When I normally make them, I use buttermilk because I like the nice tang the buttermilk adds, but this time I ventured out of the box and made scones using heavy cream. Diet woes aside, cream has always scared me. Why? I’m not sure, but whenever a recipe calls for it, I get a little antsy. It’s something about the way it curdles. But this recipe couldn’t be any easier. Be gone, irrational fear of heavy cream!

In my experience, scone dough can be really sticky and not fun to play with so I normally bust out my food processor to do all the necessary mixing. The only problem with the processor is that it tends to do too good of a job. Meaning that you end up overworking the dough, which is what happened here to me. Instead of having a wet dough, I had a really crumbly dry dough. At this point, I was a little freaked and added just a tad but more cream, but it didn’t work that well. I could either through the batch out and start over, or just proceed. Food-wasting guilt washed over me, and so I pressed on.

The end result? They turned out alright. The scones might’ve been a little too crumbly, but the insides of the scones were nice and soft surprisingly. I added in some chocolate chips in a last minute pinch so they weren’t as spread out in the scone as I would’ve liked but all’s well that ends well. Also, next time I’d put a nice egg wash over the top to give them a nice golden top, but that’s just me.

With a nice cup of tea, a big dollop of jam, and a big book to finish, I savored each bite of these cream scones. Don’t you just love lazy afternoons?

Cream Scones
From Baking: From my home to yours

Ingredients:

1 large egg
½ cup cold heavy cream
2 cups all purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and chilled
½ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (optional)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or spray with nonstick cooking spray.

Stir the egg and cream together. Set aside.

Whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together in a large bowl. Drop in the butter, and using your fingers, toss to coat the pieces of butter with flour. Quickly, working with your fingertips or a pastry blender, cut and rub the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture is pebbly. You’ll have pea-size pieces, pieces the size of oatmeal flakes and pieces the size of everything in between- and that’s just right.

Pour the egg and cream over the dry ingredients and stir with a fork just until the dough, which will be wet and sticky, comes together. Don’t over do it. Still in the bowl, gently knead the dough by hand, or turn it with a rubber spatula 8 to 10 times.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour and turn out the dough. Divide it in half. Working with one piece at a time, pat the dough unto a rough circle that’s about 5 inches in diameter, cut it into 6 or 8 wedges and place it on a baking sheet. At this point, the scones can be frozen on the baking sheet, then wrapped airtight. Don’t defrost before baking- just add about 2 minutes to the baking time.

Bake the scones for 20 to 22 minutes, or until their tops are golden and firmish. Transfer them to a rack and cool for 10 minutes. These are meant to be eaten warm and fresh. But if you want to save them, wrap them airtight as soon as cool and freeze them for up to 2 months.