Homemade Christmas Scones!

Hi, this is dirt farmer Maggie, and the holidays are almost upon us, which is a wonderful time of the year in the Cooper household. We've got our grandkids coming over, and it's just gonna be a really fun time. And one of the things that I like to do on Christmas is make scones for Christmas morning. These are cranberry orange scones, and the recipe is super easy, and it only takes 15 minutes to bake. So stay tuned and let me show you how we do it. When we were raising our five kids, Christmas was a big holiday for us, and we really emphasized a lot of traditions. We had an advent calendar every year, and every day each kid got a chance to open one of the days and see what was behind it. We did red and green pancakes. We made special things every year that were traditions for Christmas, and scones was one of them. So I wanna share my recipe with you today. It's pretty simple to make. Takes only 15 minutes to bake. And so let's get started. The first thing, I have already measured out my dry ingredients, which is 1 3 1⁄4 cup flour, three tablespoons of sugar, 2 1⁄2 teaspoons of baking powder, 1⁄2 teaspoon of salt, and 1⁄2 teaspoon of allspices. So it's what the black stuff is. So we're gonna put that in the bowl. And then we're gonna put together our wet ingredients, which will be a third of a cup of half and half. You can use milk, too, if you want to, but I like to use half and half. It makes it a little bit richer. We're gonna do a tablespoon of just regular old orange juice into the wet ingredients. A large egg. Of course, these are the eggs from our own chickens. So they're really, really dark, rich yolk. And then we're going to do a peel from an orange. So the zest of an orange. I have this really cool zester, and if you don't have one and you make stuff like this a lot, I would really recommend you get one. But I wanted to just show you, you just wanna barely take off the skin. You don't wanna get into the part underneath because that's bitter. So just barely take off the skin, and we're gonna do this whole orange. All right, so I've got the zest of the orange here. I'm gonna add that into our wet ingredients. Boy, it smells good. I always say I wish there could be smells on YouTube. That would be the clincher for this recipe. So we're just gonna mix this up and have it waiting for when we get ready. All right, the other ingredient that we're going to be using is butter, unsalted butter, which is why you add salt into the flour because you wanna be able to control the amount of salt you have. So I cut this into pieces yesterday and put it in the freezer because the colder the butter is, the easier it is to get the right texture that you need for this. So I can get them all out of the bag. And then I have a pastry blender here. If you don't have one of these, you could use a fork or you could actually use two knives to cut it, but this works really well. So we're just going to mash that butter down and start cutting it into little teeny tiny pieces. It always helps if you start out with it cut into smaller pieces anyway, but we're going to just get that all combined until it looks about like cornmeal. So I've got a little ways to go here. I still got some chunks in there. You still wanna clean it off of your pastry blender because it'll get stuck in there. Okay, you've got this to a nice consistency now. So all we're gonna do is add in our wet ingredients. And then we're just gonna stir it up. It's kind of a stiff dough. All right, so this is really coming together here now. It's kind of cleaned the sides of the bowl, which is always a good sign. And the last thing you want to do is mix in your cranberries. You can get them all mixed in really well. Spread out as evenly as possible. There we have it. So you want to put these on a well-floured surface because the dough is pretty wet. Make sure your hands have some flour on so that it doesn't stick to your hands. Now we're just gonna make it into a little ball, knead it for just a minute to get it together really well. Flour on both sides, my rolling pin. We're gonna roll it to about a half an inch thick. You don't know what a half an inch is. You can look at a ruler, but it's pretty thin. These are really going to fluff up a lot when they bake. They're probably gonna double in size. So you may think that it's gonna be really small. They're not, they're not gonna be small. Okay, so now we're just gonna cut them. Into triangles. So I've got my cookie sheet here. We're just gonna spray it a little bit with some cooking spray, just lightly, so that they won't stick as bad. You're gonna place them on the cookie sheet, keeping some distance between them because they are going to really expand when they bake. They'll be about twice the size they are now. So you want to give them plenty of room so they don't get all stuck together. And you have to sort of do a puzzle here to get the different shapes to match up so that you can space them out so they're not touching. Now we're gonna just have just a little bit of milk here in a bowl, and we're just gonna brush the top of the scones with a little bit of milk, and that helps the sugar to stick to them. And you're gonna want to get some coarse sugar. It looks kind of like crystals. And you're just gonna sprinkle on top of the scones. It adds a little extra crunchiness to the top of the scones, and a little extra sugar. Extra sugar is always good, right? Especially at Christmas time. And now we're going to put them in a 425 oven for 15 minutes. So while your scones are baking, I'm gonna make the glaze that's gonna go on top of them. So you're just gonna put some powdered sugar in a bowl. I don't know how much that's, that'll be plenty. And then just go ahead and use your orange juice to make this nice little orange glaze. Start out with just a tiny bit at first because you don't want to have to keep adding sugar to make it thicker if it's too thin. You want it to be kind of runny, but not watery. So this looks like this is gonna turn out pretty well. I'm gonna add just a little tiny splash also of orange extract, just to bump up the flavor a little bit, just maybe the orange extract, you have lemon extract, vanilla extract. They also have orange extract. Dash in there. And then when our scones come out in a few minutes, we will brush them with this glaze. These turned out really nice. You can see that they're just brown enough. They're not really sticking to the pan very much and they're gonna be really nicely done. And I'm just gonna go ahead and brush them with a little bit of this glaze. It's very orangey and sugary. So we all need more sugar at Christmas time. All right. Now I've got a little Christmas plate. I'm gonna put these on. The nice thing is, is you end up with different sizes. So if I was giving it to a small child, you can give them a small one. Giving it to an adult, you can give them one of the bigger ones. They're hot right out of the oven like this. Merry Christmas and enjoy your scones.