My kingdom for another scone…

Date scones

Scones are the unsung heroes of the baking world, often ignored in favour of their more glamorous cake cousins. They aren't ornately decorated and with their squat, brown exterior and small size, they are easily overshadowed by the luscious gateau sitting next to them on the countertop. Scones are, however, one of the most adaptable and speedy of all the baked goods. Much like bread in their versatility, scones are far quicker and easier to make, meaning you can go from concept ('oooh I'd love a scone') to finished product (satisfied smile and happy tummy) in less than an hour.

There are countless varieties of scones (different shapes and flavour combinations) but in essence, only three basic types. There’s Posh Scone; a small, fluffy number found in the rarefied surrounds of exclusive hotels, served on pretty tiered plates at Afternoon Tea and accompanied by homemade jam and a dollop of clotted cream. A more common sight is Breakfast or Elevenses Scone; larger than the posh version and traditionally available in two types, plain or fruit. This scone is generally purchased in newsagents or garages (scone quality: substandard) or in coffee shops (scone quality: variable). The more refined Foodie Scone makes an appearance in some of the more upmarket cafés, bakeshops and farmers' markets, a freshly baked offering that is often as good as homemade. In addition to the usual plain or fruit construct, the Foodie Scone is notable for its variety; it can appear as a sweet scone (e.g. pear & almond or white chocolate & cranberry) or as a savoury morsel incorporating different cheeses, olives and herbs (and as you might expect, the ingredients should be artisanal and local in order to score maximum points on the Foodie Scone Scene).

 The traditional scone mixture (flour, raising agent, butter, sugar and milk) is a simple one. As with a basic bread recipe, the scone is in essence a vehicle to carry or sit alongside other flavours. So a plain scone might be a little bland on its own, but add a spread of good salted butter and suddenly it becomes a tasty snack, while a small dollop of jam elevates it to teatime treat. If you substitute some of the white for wholemeal flour, the scone can be a healthy accompaniment to a bowl of soup or a cheeseboard. But by far the best way to vary your scone is to add something new to the mix before baking. Most often the addition will be dried fruit (raisins or sultanas) in the case of a sweet scone or cheddar cheese in a wholemeal or savoury scone, but you can really please yourself here (if you love chocolate, then a chocolate scone it is). You can also enrich the basic recipe with cream and egg, thus creating a scone that has one toe dipped firmly in the realm of cake (still very much a scone but less fluffy and light, with a tender, more cake-like crumb). The enriched scone is luxurious and infinitely more filling that the regular one, as you'll know if you've ever eaten a scone purchased from Avoca (delicious but a meal in itself quite frankly).

Glorious Apple Scone Round

One of the lesser-spotted scones, but my favourite by far, is the apple scone. My mam used to make it alot when we were younger, but until recently the recipe had languished forgotten in the good ol' Hamlyn All-Colour Cook Book. It's traditionally baked as one large round, with lines scored into the top of it before baking, and then cut or broken into triangles to serve. The recipe doesn't contain cinnamon, but I think that would make a lovely variation on the original, given its natural affinity with apples. You can treat it like a normal scone and spread it with butter but the additional moisture of the apple means that it is equally good without. The tartness of the apple also sits nicely against the sweetness of the scone, with the soft texture and crunchy sugar topping providing a lovely contrast.

Apple scone mid-devouring

Since its relaunch at my Birthday Festival, the apple scone has been making regular appearances at various family get-togethers, to much applause by all concerned. I can't recommend it enough (recipe for you to try can be found below). But before I go, just a quick update on the date scene… sorry, I mean the date scone (slip of the keyboard, so to speak). I love the versatility of the English language don’t you? One quick letter change in the word 'scene' and all of a sudden an exciting account of my love life becomes another dull treatise on scones (I'll keep it brief, I promise). Third time lucky and I think I've cracked it - I went with my baker's instinct and used an egg in the recipe, thus getting the texture I was looking for. In addition to chopped dates, I also used a homemade date syrup instead of sugar (basically dates soaked in water then whizzed up), which gave me both the colour and toffee-ish taste that I'd been missing. So the Mystery of the Date Scone has been solved once and for all. Scooby, Shaggy and the gang have nothing on me.

A rose by any other name...

Cake!

As you might expect from a girl who loves to bake, I have any number of tins and boxes in which I store my cakes. They range from the practical but boring plastic 'click & seal' tubs to charming biscuit tins I've accumulated over the years. I'm a sucker for a pretty tin, so much so that I've been known to spend a silly amount of money on not-very-nice biscuits I don't want just to get the delightful tin they come in. I also have a much loved, purpose-made red cake tin that was a gift from my sister - vintage in style, air-tight, with 'Cake' printed on the side. Altogether fabulous.

Sadly empty Roses tin

The far less glamorous side of my tin collection, however, is the ubiquitous Cadbury's Roses tin, now sadly emptied of chocolates and used to house various items, baked or otherwise. There used to be a tradition of re-using chocolate or biscuit tins, but as with everything else, tins are now seen as disposable and once the Christmas chocolate binge has morphed into January belt-tightening, out they go into the wheelie bin. The fact that the big brand tins (Cadbury's Roses, Nestle's Quality Street, Jacob's Kimberleys, etc.) are far less imaginative in design than the decorative tins of the late 19th and earlier 20th century, no doubt discourages people from holding on to them.

New tin lid

Re-using empty tins is good for the environment (less crap going into the landfills and fewer resources being wasted to create new tins); they tend to be air tight so they make excellent storage for baked goods and as they're also fairly sturdy, stackable and neat in size, they make ideal receptacles for the odds and ends that tend to accumulate around the house. The problems arise when you spot one of these tins, get terribly excited at the prospect of a chocolate or biscuit, only to find that it's either empty or full of something else altogether. Some of my earliest memories are associated with the disappointment of coming across a Roses tin post-Christmas and finding not chocolates but left-over Christmas cake or some meringues (not a bad thing you might think, but when you have a hankering for a chocolate, cake or meringue is no real substitute). The use of an empty biscuit or chocolate tin as a 'bits and bobs' tin was also fairly common in the past and an even more distressing memory is of opening the USA biscuit tin in my Nanny's pantry only to find loose screws, nails, bits of string and the odd bolt or too. Crestfallen doesn't even begin to describe the look on my little face.

Tin base

I'm proudly continuing the family tradition and use some of my old tins to store goodies or bits and bobs (odd lengths of ribbon, embroidery / sewing kit, cookie cutters, cake decorating paraphernalia, etc.). My magpie-like habit of buying pretty baubles and trinkets (e.g. ornamental buttons that I can't resist but which I will probably never use), is probably linked to my desire to have as many attractive storage options as possible (those buttons are currently housed in a recycled fluted glass jar). Rather than spend money on brand new fancy tins to fulfill my storage needs, I'm more than happy to re-use the tins left-over from the festive season, but since I don't find them at all lovely to look at, I tend to shove them under the sofa or inside a cupboard. Problems arise when the cupboards are full (which they are) and nothing more can be squeezed into the narrow space beneath the sofa (try as I might). If I'm going to have tins on show, then they will damn well be pleasing to the eye. 

Tin in situ

So in theory, the empty Christmas chocolate or biscuit tin is the ideal storage solution. In practice, well, as discussed, they're not very nice to look at - bland and as far from unique or interesting as it's possible to get. The main issue is one of aesthetics. What's a girl to do? Decoupage ladies and gentlemen - a spot of cut and paste and before you know it, you'll have your very own decorative tin in which you can put all manner of odds and ends. I've been planning to upcycle my collection of Roses tins for ages and finally got round to doing one (and boy am I glad I have more to play with, as I've noticed that this year's batch of Christmas chocolates come in nasty plastic tubs rather than tins - end of an era folks).    

My chocolate tin

I went for a black and white colour palette with a historic theme (you can take the girl out of archaeology...). I used sections of John Rocque's map of Dublin (my home town) from 1756 and prints of different views of Georgian Dublin. Now I have a tin full of chocolate that I can proudly leave sitting atop a pile of books in the corner of my sitting room. A tin plastered in old maps and images of the Fair City in days of yore might not be everyone's cup of tea, but that's the point. It's my tin, decorated by me, for me and it makes me smile every time I look at it. Job done.

First dates & photo opportunities

A lovely tea-pot in Hatch & Sons

If there's one thing I hate, it's having my photograph taken. Some people are naturally photogenic - strike a pose, any pose and they look fabulous. Not me folks. Point a camera at me and I immediately feel ill at ease, with all natural facial expressions becoming awkward and frozen. The result tends to be one of three things when I have to 'pose' for the camera: me with a forced smile that looks more like a grimace; me with a grin and manic expression worthy of the Joker in Batman; or me with a grumpy /slightly pained expression where the camera has caught me in between the cheek-aching forced smiles. 'Don't pose. Just be natural!', I hear you say. Unfortunately, in the no-pose scenario the camera has a tendency to catch me mid-sentence, as I turn to say something to my companion, eyes half closed as I blink. Usually I end up looking like the runner-up in a gurning competition or with the gormless expression of the village idiot (not a good look, trust me).

At best, the camera might catch me with my natural resting face, which is pensive verging on serious. (Even when I'm thinking pleasant thoughts and I'm perfectly happy with life in general, strangers have been known to tell me to 'Cheer up love, might never happen!'). It's been this way since I was born, with the majority of my baby photos capturing my rather solemn mien (laughing hat photo in recent blog post aside). In most of them, I stare imperiously at the camera with large serious eyes, in a 'We are not amused' kind of way, while photos in the ensuing years capture a quiet, serious child, with no wild antics or crazy poses (unlike my siblings). 

Now given that I've never really liked 'performing' for the camera, you can imagine my dread last Saturday, the day of our professional family photo shoot. It was a birthday present for my Mam, as we haven't all been in a photo together for years. So there we were - the parents, nieces, sisters and husbands - up early on a Saturday morning, washed and dressed and looking as presentable as possible. Happily, the photographer was very friendly, put us all at our ease and made us laugh for the photo (incredibly, I am neither gurning nor weirdly manic looking). Somehow, in less than half an hour (that was one speedy photographer) we managed to get a pretty good family photo that will soon be hanging in pride of place back home for all to see (so all the more reason to be grateful that I don't look like the village idiot again).

As a reward for such an exhausting experience (all that smiling!), we retired to Hatch & Sons on Stephen's Green for a late breakfast. If you haven't been, it's a wonderful cafe in the basement of one of the Georgian townhouses along the north side of the Green, beneath the Little Museum of Dublin. The style is a softened industrial chic meets old-fashioned kitchen, with the grey painted cabinets and panelling and the bare wooden floor a nod to its 18th century heritage. It's informal rather than fussy and a welcoming, comfortable place that strives to celebrate and serve all manner of Irish artisanal food (and with ten of us sampling the menu, I can report that it does this very well indeed). 

The rest of the family ordered extremely tasty hot breakfasts (the sausages served in a soft, floury Blaa come highly recommended), but I wasn't particularly hungry so I went for the scone and coffee deal (very good value). The chalkboard menu declared that the scone of the day was a Date Scone, which seemed an unusual pairing (much as I love dates, it would never occur to me to put them in a scone and in all my years of baking, I've never once seen a recipe for them either). But a scone is a scone, I thought, and as mentioned in a previous post, I do love a good scone. 

Stocks for Scone Offenders

The scone, when it arrived, was most unprepossessing. It was the size of an average home-made scone (middling to small in scale) and looked like it might have spent a few minutes too long in the oven, being a rather burnished, nutty brown colour. I was slightly concerned when I felt that it was warm - as a rule, if a scone has been reheated, you can be sure it's been zapped in the microwave. Since the result of this is a steaming hot scone with an unpleasant rubbery texture that worsens as it cools, I'll take the unheated version every time. (As an aside, if I were Queen of the World, reheating a scone in the microwave would be punishable by a spell in the stocks - naturally, as Queen, I could insist on there being stocks in all town squares in which we could place the offenders and pelt them with hot, rubbery scones fresh from the microwave). 

But back to my Date Scone. On closer inspection (a tap with my finger nail), the scone had an oven-heated crispness rather than a nuked, yielding sponginess. Even better, when I cut it in half to butter it, it was still soft and moist and not a bit over-baked. Eating my first mouthful I realised that the nutty brown crust was probably the result of caramelised brown sugar and chopped dates. The belated realisation that this was a darned good scone indeed is the reason why today's photos feature a half-eaten scone and not the intact, uncut version. I was so under-awed by it when it first arrived that I had no intentions of either taking its photo or discussing it in my blog. How wrong I was; this was an altogether wonderful scone to go with a particularly good cup of filter coffee (in most establishments 'good filter coffee' is an oxymoron, but not here). 

Date scone served warm with Glenilen butter

I have since tried to re-create my first date scone experience, but ended up with fluffy white scones with dates in them rather than 'date scones' per se; nice in their own right but definitely not the delicious Date Scone a la Hatch & Sons. I may need to add an egg (less fluffy, more soft and cakey) and experiment with muscovado sugar or even a date syrup to achieve that caramelised crust and hint of toffee flavour in the scone. I don't think you can ever completely recapture the magic of a (successful) first date, be it in a scone or one of the romantic variety. But that doesn't mean to say you can't try. I've had a nice-but-not-quite-the-same second date (successful marriages have been built on less). Third time lucky? I'll be sure to let you know.