Sweet Irish Scones

 I found this recipe a few weeks back on sheknows.com and couldn't wait to try it out! I've never made scones before, so this was a totally new thing in my book. I vowed to bake these on Saturday so that we could eat them through St. Patrick's Day. I'll post another recipe tomorrow, but for now, this can get you through breakfast  on St. Patrick's Day if you're interested.

I don't do a step-by-step too often, but I had time and while simple, these things were a more than I'm used to doing for breakfast, so I thought I'd share. 

Basic ingredients: Eggs, butter, raisins, milk, baking powder, salt, sugar and flour. For the flour, I used whole wheat, but I'd suggest an un-enriched all purpose flour. Whole wheat didn't make these rise much, but an all purpose would.

Speaking of flour, is this not the cutest mxing bowl? I'm truly obsessed with this bowl because first of all, I love glass mixing bowls, and second of all, my parents made it for me and gave it to us with wedding presents! It says, "Chris and Piper's Mixin' Bowl" LOVE it!

So let's get started! Sift the flour, sugar, and salt together. Dice up your cold butter into small pieces.

And then add the butter to the flour and mix it up with your hands. 

While I'm horrible at following directions, I promised myself I would in fact follow the directions on this recipe, since I've never made scones before. But it didn't look very mixed up, so I got this bad girl out:

And I was glad I did. It's not necessary, but it helped combine things a little since I left my butter out too long, and it was a little softer than it should have been. 

I really should have kept going, but I was impatient and had a sleeping husband, due to wake up any minute, and I wanted to have things ready when he woke up. 

So now that you've added the butter to the flour and mixed it up a little, add the raising and toss around with a fork. 

Until they are coated, and will look like this. 

In a separate bowl, pour in some milk.

and eggs.

And stir until combined.

Pour the liquid mixture into the flour mixture.

and stir it around with a fork until combined.

*Imagine there is a picture of it mixed up really well*

 The recipe instructs us to grab half the batter, but my huge cutting board wouldn't have supported that much, so I grabbed about a 1/4 of the batter. Now, shape it into a ball. 

And roll it out ....

Into about a 1/2-1" thickness. Mine was a little too thin on this batch, but it still worked fine.

Now at this point, you have some options. You can use a biscuit cutter and make little round scones, which I didn't do. Or, you could make them more traditional and triangle shaped. I went the triangle route this first time. 

And then cut into triangles. 

The recipe says to coat the top with milk for a glaze. I didn't notice this making any kind of glaze, but that could be because I used rice milk instead of cow's milk.

Place on a cookie sheet and place in the oven for 12-13 minutes.

Now these are "Irish" scones, so I thought I'd make them look more like it!

And since the milk wasn't doing much, and these aren't super sweet, I topped the second batch off with some cinnamon and sugar.

And then with the third and fourth batch, I added some blueberries and a blueberry glaze. As you can see, these were not very pretty, but my husband loves blueberries and since I didn't add them in there, I had to recover somehow.

And they all turned out pretty good. I didn't take enough pictures, but this was of the first batch, which I rolled out a little thin. For whole wheat, they tasted really good. Not too sweet, yet perfectly sweet with a bite with raisins. 

This was the inside. Very tasty! I'd make these again, but I'd roll them out to about an inch thick, and I'd use all purpose flour next time. 

Still great, though! SInce they weren't very sweet, I did add a glaze of powdered sugar and milk to them, which I tilted green. I'm not sure why I didn't take a picture of that

 But here's an unglazed picture. Very tasty little things! 

Recipe: 

Ingredients:
6-1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup sugar
3 teaspoon baking powder
1-1/2 sticks butter, cut into small pieces
1 cup currants or raisins
3 eggs
2 cups milk 

Directions:

Preheat oven to 475 degrees F. Sift flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder together.

Using your hands, mix in butter pieces with flour mixture.

Add currants or raisins and stir with a fork.

Mix eggs and milk in a separate bowl.

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, and pour in milk mixture.

Working with 1/4 of the dough at a time, shape into a ball and roll flat into about 1" thickness on a floured board. 

Cut into pieces (with a cookie cutter, biscuit cutter, or just cut with a knife to make triangles)

Bake for 12-13 minutes or until very light brown.

I'm submitting this to the Paddy's Day parade. I'm new to this world, but man it sure is fun!!

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I also made some cupcakes. I just used a boxed cake mix (Naturally Nora) since that brand doesn't use enriched flour in the mix. They were soooo good!

Just plain vanilla cupcakes. 

BUT THE FROSTING!! The frosting is what made them to DIE for! 

I'm not kidding. 

It was the best frosting I've ever had. It tasted just like cheesecake.
 And in fact, I keep eating it my itself, which is NOT. GOOD. Especially because the recipe involves a massive amount of butter. 

I'll post the recipe sometime later today. 

And more St. Patrick's Day things tomorrow.