Alpha Bakers: Irish Cream Scones

I am beginning to realize that the easier the recipe is, the more disorganized I become. Especially on recipes that are tagged Q&E. It's like it's screaming at me: "hey, I'm easy, you can whip me up in no time and still have the rest of the day left to do whatever."

In the case of this recipe, I skimmed through the recipe a few days before the weekend, was pleased to discover that I have all the ingredients on hand. No need to buy additional stuff from the store. I also decided to make the full recipe, since these are scones (bread-types) and can be frozen and I have friends who was complaining that I always make cakes and should make more bread/pastry type things so I proceeded with full recipe. And while prepping the ingredients I realize that I am 3 oz of cream short. And I don't have any lemons. Or honey. Rats.

In my defense I have long given up buying honey, just because I buy them, use 2 tablespoon, then the bottle of honey sits in the pantry, where it slowly and surely crystallize until 3, 6, 9 months later when I need it and it's hard as rock. In the rock-crystallized state it's usually still usable, provided we use it in warm beverage or baking. But it's not really something that we can pour over bread or toasted bread. And crystallized honey is not pretty. Considering it's freaking expensive to purchase, I decided that we will just support the fair trade agave bottle business that cost a 1/2 of what honey cost and does not crystallized. Having said that, I have a sad-looking bottle of maple syrup that fortunately have not crystallized but been in the pantry for a year now.

Last November, Vicki asked me what I'm knitting. Here are 3 projects I finished recently. A cardigan, a hat, and a sweater pullover.

Step by step photos:

Combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt, sugar), including grated orange zest and raisins. I happen to have a bunch of dried fruits on hand so I used 1/2 raisins and 1/2 apple-sweetened cranberries.

Clearly unable to read instructions today, Jenn - open other side means the other side, not this side.

Add honey agave to the dried ingredients.

Add cream. Supplement with unsweetened almond milk due to not enough cream.

Mix everything together...

until it forms a nice little ball of scone dough.

Then place it into saran-lined 8-inch spring form pan. I usually detest using saran wrap and avoid it whenever possible because it feels so wasteful to use it once and then toss it away (plastic is the devil) so this would be one of those times where I would be cussing inside on why we have to use saran wrap (yes I know why but I complain anyway). But ever since Marie let it slip once that Rose has re-used saran wrap and re-used zip lock bags I have been doing that too. So the 2 saran wrap that I use in the below picture have been washed with soap, air-dried, and lovingly stored in a drawer now to be used in the future.

After it's been refrigerated for half an hour to firm the dough up for easier cutting.

Slice into 8 pieces evenly. There is nothing even about my slicing - I must have had an eye problem this morning.

While the scones are baking, make the raspberry butterscotch syrup.

I have already took out the frozen raspberries in the morning. Though I of course glazed over the instruction on thawing it over a strainer and just thaw it in the pan, so now the raspberries and the juice are together and there's no way to separate them so I didn't even bother to boil/reduce the juice and just blender the whole thing.

It does look yummy-licious like this.

Next, a wee bit of heavy cream, brown sugar, buttah, and corn syrup gets cooked together to be a happy butterscotch sauce.

Starts bubbling.

Then bubbling furiously.

Then after it cooled down it gets mixed with the raspberry. And I again glazed over the instructions where it said to mix a bit of the raspberry sauce with the butterscotch and instead dump the whole butterscotch and raspberry together so the sauce is very red and raspberry as you can see from the photo below.

The photo above is my very high tech food photography set up. As you can see it's very fancy, and the scones looks awfully pretty next to my surprisingly still alive basil, thyme, and oregano indoor plants.

Okay so let's count how many mistakes Jenn has made this time. On ingredients: not enough cream, no lemon, no honey (that's 3 total). On directions: can't slice evenly, forgot to strain the frozen raspberry, mix the whole raspberry with butterscotch (that's 3 total). 6 mistakes. And yet this recipe still comes out good and was wolfed down by my knitting group.

Close up shot of the inside.

Alpha Bakers is a group of bakers who are baking through The Baking Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum's latest cookbook. Come check out the rest of the group at Rose's Alpha Bakers.