Scones

I have not yet tasted a scone. I want to. With the abundance of cafes on campus, it's a wonder I haven't yet. I love our homemade scones, but I'm pretty confident they're different from the scones here. However, I must point out that I loath Starbucks' idea of what a "scone" should taste & look like. They make triangle cupcakes, not scones.

But I digress....

With a cold front in full force and spotty rain, I donned my wellies, and hoofed it to the grocery store for a couple ingredients for a batch of scones.

Oh. My. Sconeness. The self-rising flour, baking soda, and real European butter made the absolutely BEST dough I have ever experienced when making scones. I also used high-quality vanilla with vanilla beans in the bottle and soy milk (slightly sweeter than US soy milk).

Fantastic batch. I chose my method of forming the dough into a circle then slicing it like a pie, as opposed to the UK method of cutting out circles with a cutter. My reasoning, the less you mess with a dough, the more flaky and soft the results. Using a circle cutter requires picking up the remains and reshaping them to cut out more. This can toughen the dough.

They are as delicious as they look.

Food

It's wonderful having a working kitchen.

Made Kate some chocolate chip cookies for the weekend. I asked if she wanted me to try my family's famous chocolate chip cookies or our delicious, traditional pumpkin sweet bread. I had to chuckle a little bit when she chose the cookies because just this week I learned that the English don't eat much pumpkin, and certainly don't have sweet pumpkin breads on ready supply.

I can't say her choice was a poor one. The cookies turned out lovely :)

English Term: Biscuit
Translation: A cookie sandwich, square cookie, tea cookie
Equivalent: Oreos, traditional Mexican cookies, Sugar cookies

English Term: Cookie
Translation: Round cookie with chocolate chips
Equivalent: What I made for this weekend :)

Ingredients

Roughly 350*F. But this is a convection oven which means the heat is blown around, things cook quicker.

The most delicious REAL butter I've ever smelled.

"Caster" sugar is a grain between sugar and powedered sugar. It's specific for baking. "Demerara" is brown sugar. Here the granules are much bigger.

The eggs are ALWAYS at room temperature. The vanilla had actual bits of the pods and was the consistency of syrup.

Oatmeal and an equal mixture of dark & milk chocolate. Key note: ALWAYS add more chocolate chips than the recipe calls for.

"Bicarbonate of soda" (baking soda) has the strangest, coolest consistency! Like crushing snow without the melt. That bag of salt costs 25p!

Crushed almonds. (roasted at home)

A delicious final product :)

Recipes in the UK are traditionally done by weight (grams). But I know this by heart, so I didn't bother with weighing the ingredients. They use 3, that's right 3, methods of measurement: imperial, metric, weight.