Mia Bakes: Mixed Fruit Cream Scones

Some mixed fruit cream scones, anyone? :) Oh well, but if you haven't guessed it, they're all gone by now. So why don't you make some yourself? It'll just take you.... 30 minutes (if you don't mind not having much of that fancy layered flakiness)?

So let's get over the ingredient so we can get started! To get 6 scones, you'll need:

100g top flour (or cake flour)

28g superfine wholemeal flour 

(or swap it back for top/cake flour)

30g FROZEN, CUBED unsalted butter

60ml cooking cream (& an additional 1.5 tsp)

(or you can also use heavy, or whipping cream)

1 egg, beaten (separate into TWO servings)

5 tsp baking stevia 

(my baking stevia is in 1:2 sugar ratio, so you can do your own conversion according to your own sweetness preference)

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp baking powder

40g mixed dried fruits

(or you can use dried raisins, currants, sultanas etc)

First up, mix all your dried ingredients (flours, baking powder, sweetener) into a bowl and give it a quick whisk to combine. Then, cut in your frozen butter either with a pastry cutter, a mini food processor (recipe is too little to be using a large heavy duty one) , a fork with a knife, or simply just using your fingertips and rubbing the butter in. 

Stop when your butter are reduced to pea-sized and pretty evenly distributed in the dry ingredients. 

Then, mix in the dried fruits before adding in HALF of the beaten egg along with the cream and vanilla extract and give it a quick knead until everything just comes together into a dough. 

Never, ever overmix your scone dough as it'll work up the gluten in your flour (especially if you're substituting with all purpose flour) and you'll get tough, rock cake like scones. 

If you're in a hurry and do not like to wait, you can just pack the dough into a rectangular shape that's roughly 1.5 inches thick and cut them into 6 equal pieces, brush the top with some egg wash (add 1.5 tsp cream or milk to the remaining half of your beaten egg) and send them to bake at an oven pre-heated to 220 degree Celsius for 13 to 15 minutes, or until the top surface has browned nicely. 

If you can afford to wait for a couple more hours, then shape your dough into a rectangle, wrap it up in cling wrap and pop it into the fridge for at least an hour (I left mine overnight). 

Then, take out your cold dough from the fridge and let it rest for a few minutes on the counter if it's too stiff to work with (but it shouldn't be). With a bench scraper, cut the dough into half and stack the two pieces on top of each other. With the bench scraper (or roll with a rolling pin, if you prefer), press the dough to flatten it back into a rectangle of the previous size and slice it into two again. Repeat this slice-stack-flatten process for a total of 4 to 6 times. At any time, if you feel that your dough is getting too soft, wrap it back up in clingwrap and pop it back into the fridge for 10 minutes or so to firm it up. 

Then, cut your final rectangular dough into 6 equal pieces, brush the top with some egg wash and bake them off!

These cream scones are tender and crumbly, with a slight buttery fragrance (which is definitely something extremely important for a good scone, in my opinion) as compared to those cream scones that only uses heavy cream to replace all the fat (butter) in the recipe. Yes, that saves you the hassle of cutting frozen butter into the flour, but a scone ain't a good scone if it doesn't have the buttery fragrance, yes?

Till then,

Mia Foo