Saturday, August 16, 2008

Corn Scones

This morning I decided to finally try making something out of the Moosewood Cooks at Home cookbook, which I purchased many months ago at the recommendation of Why Bee. It contains lots of fairly simple and (pesce)vegetarian recipes that sound really good. I made corn scones, which are basically scones with cornmeal in them. I'd never made ordinary scones either, but I thought I'd give it a try. Here's a link to the corn scones recipe that someone else has graciously posted.
I'm not convinced they turned out right, but they tasted pretty good to me. The recipe said that the brown sugar should be mixed into the milk and then melted butter should be added. It didn't say to stir it, but it also didn't say not to stir it. I'm thinking that stirring was a bad idea, because the melted butter quickly began to solidify in the cold milk, turning my nice liquid into a goopy mess. I decided to just stir it into the dry ingredients anyway, but that resulted in
a comparatively dry-crumbly mess. I also substituted dried cherries for the currants and that turned out to be a great substitution.

I was supposed to form it into an eight inch disk on a floured surface, so I decided to do that on a paper plate. That worked pretty well, but I think it might have ended up being slightly thicker than the 1/2 inch that the recipe recommended.

Overall I'm still pretty happy with the scones, even though I don't think they rose enough. My two Most Faithful Guinea Pigs will be trying them in the morning, so hopefully they will let me know.

3 comments:

  1. I think the liquid portion looking curdled and chunky is perfectly fine. Lumpy butter is what gives it a coarse crumb. (I favor a recipe that has you use a pastry cutter, and not melt the butter, but I think it comes to the same thing.)

    Scones are muffin-like, in that you've mixed too long if the dough/batter looks smooth and homogeneous. I dump the whole mess into a pie pan, then dump that onto the cookie sheet, to cut them apart there. They don't hold together enough to pick them up, so I push them around with the side of a spatula.

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  2. Thanks, Camilla! I feel less like I did something wrong then. I've never made muffins either, so the experience wasn't familiar at all. There's a muffin recipe I want to try out of the same cookbook if I can commandeer some apples.

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  3. Your scones look yummy!

    To me, there are 2 kinds of scones--the cakey, fluffy ones, and the flatter, drier, crumbly ones. Myself, I favor the crumbly stuff, although both are good. Kinda like the frozen yogurt vs. ice cream comparison, they're both good but they aren't to be directly compared. So I'd say don't worry if your scones don't look like they rose enough.

    Like cornbread, ya know. Some people like the sweet cake-like stuff, but not us.

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