Long time no see. I haven’t been cooking at all recently as I’ve been living off whatever Mummy Duggers deems fit to stock the fridge with. (Unfortunately this isn’t lamb shanks, rabbit or quail. Unless it’s for the cats of course…) This is because I quit the Scary New Job which had become the I Want To Kill Myself Every Morning Job.
Unemployment is liberating and wonderful, though not stress free. Every time I get a letter from Lloyds I am convinced that as soon as I open it bailiffs will suddenly appear at the front door. Also coming up to Christmas it’s quite depressing to realise that your account balance is -£9.47.
I suppose that I’m technically freelance, though what I’m freelancing in is a bit of a mystery. I have been doing a couple of week’s work at a new iPad magazine, mainly getting the editor sandwiches as everyone is still trying to work out why I’m actually there and what I should really be doing.
Unneeded last week I raided the cupboards after finding a scribbled recipe for scones I must have got from somewhere. This didn’t take too long as all they are is:
300ml of milk (I used skimmed as this is all we ever have)
450g of self-raising flower
80g of unsalted butter
3 tablespoons of caster sugar
A pinch of salt
Cut the butter into little cubes. Weirdly this is something I really, really enjoy.
Sieve the flour, sugar and salt together and rub in the butter until it all looks like breadcrumbs. This takes a while but it’s so, so satisfying. My friend Alex has an odd phobia of getting things on her hands. She can’t touch flour. It’s very strange and completely irrelevant but I thought I’d mention it just in case you’re the same. If you are then you’ll have to live with shop-bought scones. I’m sure there is a way of rubbing butter into flour without actually doing it but I’ve no real idea.
It’s a very short journey from my favourite bit to the bit I find mind numbingly boring. With a knife mix the milk in splosh by tiny sposh. And when I say tiny splosh I mean tiny splosh. I made these again yesterday and my first batch was soaking. The dough ended up being like superglue and covered my hands when I picked it up to see if I could roll it into a ball. I honestly thought I’d be stuck there for an hour until Mummy Duggers got back from Tesco. Though I’d like to make it clear that I don’t actually know if this was because I added the milk too quickly. It could just be that I’m a bit of a moron and mucked it up God knows how.
Your mix ends up looking like lots of little bits of dough that will never come together until that magic last drop of milk at which point the whole thing will feel like mixing a big ball of cement.
Get your hands in and squish it into a ball. You can stick this in the fridge over night or start rolling it out immediately. I was worried that my dough was far too wet. It felt really sticky and I felt a little tantrum coming on. I stuck it in the fridge hoping that this would somehow suck the moisture out (no, I don’t know why I thought that either). Turns out it was fine, so don’t start chucking utensils through the microwave door just yet.*
Heat the oven to 220°c and flour a work surface. I find this an absolute pain in the arse. However neat I am I always end up finding flour underneath the kettle or neatly piled behind the toaster three weeks later.
Don’t roll out the dough too much – around an inch thick is about as thin as you want to go. While I expected these to rise an awful lot they, well, they just don’t. Use a scone-sized cutter. I’ve no idea what size mine is but it looks scone-sized. The dough is incredibly stretchy and elastic, which in my childish way I really enjoyed.
Once you’ve cut your scones out grease a baking tray and stick them in the oven for about 14 minutes or a bit longer if you’ve got a rubbish oven like mine, until the scones are golden brown on top.
Let these cool and eat before they go stale, which is unfortunately in about two or so hours.
*Obviously this isn’t the case with yesterday’s super-glue batch…
