When my girls were young, some other neighborhood moms and I would walk downtown really early on Saturday mornings to a certain coffee shop that had the best scones. My favorites were the cranberry ones. I’ve tried baking scones multiple times and while they were good, they never had the texture that I liked so much.
A couple of weeks ago I picked up a used copy of The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook (for a penny plus shipping!). The first recipe I made from it was for these cream scones. Rather than currants I used sweetened dried cranberries, hoping against hope that I might have a winner–and I do!
If you want to get fancy, you can brush the tops with a little cream and sprinkle on a little sugar before baking but they’re really quite good without that.
Cream Scones with Dried Cranberries
Ingredients
- 2 cups flour
- 1 Tablespoon baking powder
- 3 Tablespoons sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 5 Tablespoons butter, chilled and cut into 1/4″ pieces
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries
- 1 cup cream
Instructions
- Put your oven rack in the middle position and preheat the oven to 425F.
- In a food processor, put the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt and pulse to mix. Add the chilled butter pieces and pulse a dozen times or so, until the butter is cut in. Add the cranberries and pulse again. (You can also use a pastry blender or your fingertips to blend the butter and flour, then add the cranberries.
- Move the dough into a bowl, add the cream and stir with a heavy spatula or wooden spoon until the dough comes together.
- Put the dough on a floured surface and knead about ten seconds.
- You can just pat the dough out into a 9″ circle or flour a 9″ cake pan and pat the dough out into that for a more perfect shape. Turn out and cut into 8 wedges.
- Place the wedges on an ungreased baking pan and bake for 12-15 minutes, until lightly browned. Let cool on a wire rack at least 10 minutes before eating.
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