…not to be snide, but its not that hard to find a good (English) scone recipe – but then I suppose there wouldn’t be a funny story if you’d just handed her the answer! (I like the 3c SR flour : 1c cream : 1c lemonade recipe myself – non-traditional inredients, but so easy, and makes perfect scones.)
@underanothername I can’t believe the scone post is still getting notes lol, but allow me to just say after living in America for 3 years—what Americans think of as a good “British” scone recipe (it varies depending on where you are in the UK) and what is actually a British scone is wildly different. (It’s also a palate thing. Most Americans in my experience like soft gooey sweet things. Most British baked goods you can throw against a wall and the only damage you’re going to do is to the wall, but by god you can bake ‘em using rationed food and also fight off invading forces if you have to.) For one thing, if I ever put lemonade near my recipe, my mother would ascend through the earth’s crust, tsk between her teeth and say “oh. you’re doing it like that are you?”
I actually had so many people ask me how to make traditional (Scottish) scones so often I put the recipe in my profile page lmao.
As for the baker in question, she did eventually make the Perfect™ traditional scone based on taste testing, from one baker to another. But because she’s primarily baking for Americans it’s not a thing she can sell without people complaining it’s not sweet/soft/dense-cake like enough, so she’s back to making dense muffins and calling them scones. Though thankfully not with rosewater and lavender :p
Most British baked goods you can throw against a wall and the only damage you’re going to do is to the wall, but by god you can bake ‘em using rationed food and also fight off invading forces if you have to.
This is 100% accurate and brings back fond memories of my grandad’s scones and cakes. You could have them for tea, or you could just as easily use them to fill a hole in the garden fence.
I was always told scones require buttermilk to get them to rise right, but I’ve never been able to test it myself. Never heard of using lemonade.
I looked up scones and they look very much like the biscuits we have here. Which are as you say, super soft and fluffy, unless of course they are a bit old. They are never ever sweet, and are more or less a bread.
The scone i am familiar with is this. They had them on Wednesdays at my highschool for breakfast.
they were a bit sweet (most of the sweet comes form the icign they often had, the ‘bread’ itself was mildly sweet) , super dense and hard. often having fruit in them, like rasins, or my favorite, cranberries. They sound kind of similar to what you are talking about =0
Course they could of been as hard as they were cause its a highschool cafeteria, so the food is sub par.
See to me those look more like rock cake lol, which is scone like but harder.
why would you put icing on a scone thats sacrilige. either some jam or butter if its a cheesey scone. treacle scones are pure and need nothing extra.
TREACLE SCONES YES
If your scones are wall-denting, you’re baking ‘em wrong. They should be light and fluffy, with a crumbling crust and a glazed top. And also round. I get the impression American shortcake is quite a similar thing.
Icing is just… it’s an odd addition. Scones are intended as a mildly sweet base for (butter), jam and cream, not really intended to be eaten unadorned.
British baking is not commonly hard, dense and heavy (I don’t know where the OP was eating to get that idea, but bad baking exists in every country and if we were going to judge a country by the worst it can produce, I’d have to flag up Cakewrecks as my counterargument).
(And I have a frustrated relationship with the American stereotype of ‘bad British food’. I will take that accusation from Italy, not from the land of kraft cheese.
My theory is that this is a stereotype formed the last time Americans happened to be over here in great numbers – US troops during the war. When we had rationing. Hardly a fair time to judge our culinary creativity. Rationing lasted into the 50s, so an entire generation grew up without having been exposed to interesting, non-local food in their youth. British cuisine during the 60s and 70s really was bland and stidgy by all accounts. But so was American food (at least, in both cases, if you were a white non-big-city-dweller).
I don’t know where the OP was eating to get that idea
I’m from Scotland and worked for 10 years in a Victorian styled bakery where we made everything by hand. And I didn’t say it was hard and dense, I said you could throw it at a wall and it’d stay intact, as in, it’s not barely held together and still soft in the middle which is the bane of my existence over here since I’ve moved to America. It was a gag, based on a Pratchett post earlier in my feed.
The French would argue with you though. They find British baking incredibly hard and dense.
Oh, well, yeah, the French are allowed to with their cakes made of air. They take things altogetheer TOO FAR thiugh and produce things like macaroons. But I still disagree that British baking tends towards the dense. But I’m coming from a southerner’s perspective, I know Scots are a bit more resilient in their approach to a good crust. Definitely T’ Bread Wi’ T’ Edge
It keeps the damp out :p
And ah you’ve no lived till you’ve had an irn bru flavored macaroon. (Also known as: how to make your French exchange student rage cry)
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