Scones

We ran out of muffin cups during Lent, and, as I had given up buying non-essential things at the grocery store considering the state of our pantry closet, no muffin cups were on the horizon any time soon. However, muffin mixes abounded seeing as I (before Lent) kept buying a few at a time whenever they were on sale. Ryan hates washing the muffin tins, especially when muffins have been made in them without muffin cups, and I'm not a big fan of it, either, so making muffin-cup-free muffins was out of the question. Hence, I started pondering the similarities between muffin recipes and scone recipes. After comparing them in Betty Crocker, I decided that I could make scones from muffin mixes as follows:

Dump muffin mix into bowl. Add 1-2 teaspoons of baking powder, stir all together. Cut in 1/3 cup cold butter (yes, butter--we have switched from margarine since we have become convinced that trans fats truly are awful for you--and us--though at the time I started these I was probably still using margarine or shortening if I didn't have margarine/butter) using a pastry blender--you probably want to cut the butter up into smaller chunks using a knife before attacking it with the pastry blender. When the mixture is the consistency that it should be (according to one scone recipe I looked at, it looks like "wet sand"--I just go with "fine crumbs" myself), add a beaten egg and a few tablespoons of milk and stir until dough comes together and leaves sides of bowl. You don't want to over-mix (same idea as with biscuits). You may have to add a bit more milk as you're going. I started just pouring some milk in without measuring at any point, but you want the dough to be kind of like biscuit dough, so don't add too much. If you're making the scones from a muffin mix that has things to add at the end, such as blueberries or apple filling, stir that stuff in carefully here--once, again, take care not to mix too much. Then, if you like round drop scones, drop the size you'd like onto a baking stone (or a baking sheet if that's all you have) and bake at whatever temperature the muffin box says for somewhere between 15-20 minutes (time is pretty variable on these--watch for whatever color of doneness you like and take them out then--I make it up every time). If you like triangular scones, you can knead the dough lightly on a floured surface 4 or 5 times, then squish it (okay, most cookbooks use the word "pat" instead of "squish," I think, but squish is more like what I do) down to the thickness that you think it should be before it bakes (they will rise some) either in a circle or a rectangle, cut that into triangles, and place the triangles on the baking stone/sheet (or squish it directly on the stone/sheet, score it into triangles and cut them apart as soon as you deem them baked to your satisfaction--but I think they take longer to bake using that method and I can't see any great advantage over separating them before baking. So it's your choice: break-and-bake or bake-and-break) and cook them the same way you would drop scones.

Having now used up all but one of our muffin mixes (and the last one is Cinnamon Streusel, which we had way too many of before, so I'm sick of them), I graduated to scones from scratch. The first ones I made were apple cinnamon streusel scones and chocolate chip scones based on the Betty Crocker recipe for basic scones. They both turned out more like flavored biscuits, so that recipe has since been abandoned. We had to take breakfast to church yesterday, so we tried two new scone recipes--this time Ryan picked them out. Both of them are from Joy of Baking. I was not impressed with the chocolate chip scones (though I did forget the egg wash and the cinnamon sugar, which may have helped), but the cranberry oat scones, even without the egg wash, the sugar on top, and the lemon or orange zest, were amazing. I was leaning toward the conclusion that I should just give up on chocolate chip scones, but Ryan says we should try making chocolate chip oat scones using the cranberry oat scones recipe, so we'll probably do that once before completely despairing. Oh, by the way, we only had salted butter, so I just left the salt out of the dough.

Based on these recipes, if I make scones from muffin mixes again, I will probably add 1/2-1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, some oats, closer to 1/2 cup butter, and skip the egg instead of what I did before. They were good as described above, but more like rich muffin tops than scones, so we'll see if making these alterations makes them more scone-like.