like a kid on Christmas...

Oops.

So last night I said I wasn't going to bake until Tuesday. But then I woke up this morning and in the process of checking the time on my iPod noticed a nice little email from my upstairs neighbor. It contained the recipe for cream scones she told me about at dinner yesterday.

I looked at the clock and determined that with an hour before D needed to get up and shower, I could pull myself out of bed, make the dough, bake and have time to wake him up with fresh scones and a hot mug of tea. Well, he ended up getting an extra 30 minutes of sleep—turns out I'm not quite as speedy in the mornings.

These scones were super yummy. They were warm from the oven and we each had two.

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Half and Half Scones
adapted from Smitten Kitchen
makes 12 scones

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1T baking powder (I'd use a scant tablespoon in the future, you could definitely taste it)
3T sugar (I'd use 4 next time)
5T frozen, salted butter (it was all I had on hand; if you're using unsalted, just add some salt)
0.5c dried apples, chopped into bits
0.5c walnuts, chopped into bits
0.5c dried cranberries, chopped into bits
1c half and half (you could use cream, but I didn't feel like walking to get some when we already had half and half in the fridge)

These were worth some lost sleep.

Directions
1. Mix together the flour, baking powder and sugar.
2. Cut the butter into small cubes (about 0.25 inch in each direction). Add the butter to the flour mixture and rub it in with your hands. This step takes about 5 minutes and the final texture will be more like fine cornmeal with a few bigger lumps in it. The idea is to get the flour to coat little bitty pieces of butter.
3. Stir in the apples, walnuts and cranberries (or whatever else you fancy).
4. Add the half and half and stir together into a coherent mass. It will be very sticky and a bit difficult to deal with.
5. You can either try to cut these into triangles like a proper scone, or you can save extra clean up and just make blobs on a very lightly oiled baking tray. They expand some, but not too much, so you can put them pretty close together on the tray.
6. Bake for 12 minutes at 425°F, rotating halfway through. They will just start to brown in places.
7. Cool for 5-10 minutes and enjoy warm with a mug of hot tea. Yum!!!
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