These fruity, feather-light scones are the work of minutes and it’s lucky that they’re best eaten on the day they’re made, as they never last any longer in our house. Split them and butter them while still warm, put the kettle on and enjoy a break.
There are just a few things to remember to get the best out of your scones: don’t handle the dough too much or they’ll toughen up; make a clean cut up and down with your pastry cutter (no twisting) to get a straight-sided rise; dip the cutter into flour between each cut; and because the raising agent will start to activate the moment you pour in the buttermilk, get them in the oven as quickly as possible.
Blueberry Buttermilk Scones
Ingredients:
225g plain flour
1 level tspn bicarbonate of soda
2 level tspn cream of tartar
Pinch of salt
40g butter
30g caster sugar
100g fresh blueberries
150ml buttermilk
Method:
Heat oven to 220C/425F/Gas Mark 7.
Sift the flour, bicarb, cream of tartar and salt into a bowl. Add the butter in pieces and run in with the fingertips. Stir in the sugar and blueberries.
Make a well in the centre of the mix and pour into the buttermilk. Mix with a table knife until the dough is soft but not sticky. Turn onto a lightly floured board and knead briefly, just two or three times, to smooth the underside.
Turn the dough over and pat to a thickness of 2cm. Using a 7cm diameter cutter, cut into rounds. Press together the trimmings and keep cutting until you’re out of dough.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, place the scones on top, evenly spaced, and put immediately in the pre-heated oven. Bake for 12 minutes until well-risen and light brown. Transfer to a wire rack and cool for 15 minutes before splitting and buttering.
Lovely scones !
Thanks! I usually get a better rise but this was my second batch (naturally I didn’t photograph the first) and I’d run out of blueberries!
Great advice for successful scones, I haven’t made them in ages and I’ve never added blueberries. Time for tea
Thanks, Sandra, much appreciated. Lx
Forgive me for suggesting that you may be using a little too much butter….
They look excellent.
Haha, yes, I did slap it on a bit thick there at the end. Was more circumspect with the other half, honest. Thanks, Conor. xx
I believe you…..
Believe it or not, I’ve never actually eaten a scone that I can remember! Shocking, I know. Must try these soon—and I disagree with Conor, the amount of butter looks just right… 😉
Frank, I’m frankly horrified! You’ll never get a visa for the UK if you can’t prove you’ve eaten tea and scones. 🙂 Hope you like them if you try them and thanks for taking the time to comment. All the best. Lx
Yum~! Hubby and I just had our very first scones just 2 days ago at a “i-want-to-dive-in-and-roll-around-in-it” pastry stall on the Temple Bar Food Market in Dublin – and, as coincidences go, they were Blueberry Scones 😀 I’m so going to make these as soon as I can get my hands on an oven~!
That sounds like my kind of pasty stall! How is Dublin? It’s a lovely city. Enjoy! Lx
It was great~! And delicious 🙂 and, as most city-trips end up being, quite exhausting, but in a good way~ Totally worth the blisters and sore muscles! But I have to admit, I can’t wait to actually leave the city on our next trip to Ireland because, after all, the capital city of a country or region only gives you a glimpse of what’s waiting beyond the city limits~
Definitely. The west of Ireland is well worth a visit, as is Donegal. There’s a lot to see, with wildly varying landscapes in a small country. Glad you enjoyed Dublin.
scones… our nemesis and delight! …
… when Paul and I opened our cafe and restaurant in Lyme Regis (on the Jurassic coast, a place of truly outstanding beauty), it was pretty clear that we simply had to make scones (to be served with clotted cream of course): if u have a catering business down there, there is no escape from that: visitors often would have them for breakfast, elevenses, lunch and tea time.. Dorset and Devon is scone and clotted cream land.
I was really resisting the idea because in my experience (from local tea- rooms), scones were this awfully dry, tasteless, huge blobs…..(I later on discovered that (shame on them) many establishments use ready made scone mix and are very mean with butter)
..but scones had to be. I started researching in all my cookery books and on line and eventually I settled for an old National Trust recipe that used lots of butter and lard (I think Felicity Cloake landed on the same recipe years later) and that were barely sweet, tall but not dry:very good and with no awful baking soda aftertaste: so scones could be good! ah ah! the light bulb moment!: so tat was the secret … be generous with butter (I ended up using butter only, because I have never found good lard in this country (even in the countryside)/actually I have found excellent lard: from Brindisa, made from the fat of iberico pigs: but it would have been to expensive): 100 g butter to 350 g self raising flour !! really good…
…however, since we were baking huge amounts every day, that 100 g butter seemed silly (from a standard 250 g packet and doubling the recipe, we would have been left with a little and silly 50 g knob of butter: pretty annoying in a professional fridge to have all these bits and pieces)… so I decided to up the butter: 125 g to 350 g flour! … even better…
..I then remembered a technique I had learned when making american style biscuits (the quick bread-style ones): to leave the butter in fairly large pieces (think hazelnuts) and to keep the mix very cold: when these little pellets of cold butter melt, like in bliz puff pastry, the create the most amazing soft and yet flaky dough….I tried and it worked also on scones! I kept the dry mix in the freezer and the cold mix (half milk half skimmed yogurt in the fridge), so that, when we made the dough, everything was really very, very (almost unpleasantly) cold.
in order to minimize waste: we would pat the dough into a thick rectangle (approx 1 inch high) and cut the lot into farls: I had checked some Victorian cookery books (and, as usual, Saint Elizabeth of David) and I had found out that actually scones were once also made as farls… bingo
…. scones became the top seller of the cafe (unfortunately from a certain point of view: gosh, I made sooooo many of them every day, trays and trays… – soooo boring!) and many customers said, time and time again, they were the most delicious, tender scones they had ever tasted! …not bad for an Italian cook 🙂
..I became a converted too: .. and I ended up putting on more than 10 kg! 🙂 (although that has to do more with owning and running a restaurant to b e honest, one of the most stressful work experiences ever…but great at the same time, of course)
…. long story, I know but I could not resist 🙂
stefano
That’s really interesting. Yes, I sometimes make them flaky, too, very tender, although I prefer the butter rubbed in in this recipe. I must try your version, it sounds great. I can well believe the weight gain. When I started this blog the Mrs Portly title was meant as a joke … no longer! Lx