Gemma's ultimate Irish scones recipe

Hi Bold Bakers, being Irish of course I'm gonna honor St. Patrick's Day, so I have a new and improved traditional Irish scone recipe for you. You loved the one that I shared two years ago, well this one is bigger and bolder. The recipe can be found on BiggerBolderBaking.com along with all of my other recipes. Scones are incredibly easy to make and you can whip them up in no time. They're something that's known as a quick bread, you mix them all up by hand in the one bowl. Into a large bowl we're gonna add self-raising flour and some baking powder. And then mix these two ingredients together well. So self-raising flour is a really common flour that we use at home in Ireland. It is just plain flour mixed with baking powder and I have a recipe on my website of how you can easily make it at home and it works the exact same way. Okay this is good. Now for my next trick, I have some frozen butter. Check that out. As they say in Ireland, as hard as the hobs of hell. It is rock solid. What I'm going to do with this is I'm going to have a grater here and I'm going to grate it directly into my bowl, into my flour. And what this does, it gives you tiny little bits of butter all the way throughout. And then what this does when it bakes is it releases steam and it makes your scones rise. It's a really fantastic little trick. If you were to look in my freezer at any given time, I always have frozen butter in there because this trick works really well for biscuits and for pastry making. It just makes it really light and flaky. So now a little tip when you're grating in the butter, keep the paper on so it protects your fingers from the grater. Usually what I do is I cut a little bit extra butter, more than I need, and then I use that little bit of a cushion to protect my fingers. And look at that, lovely, really finely grated butter, all uniform, this is fantastic. So that's our butter, now next into here I'm gonna add in a little bit of sugar. Scones aren't overly sweet but they do have a little bit of sweetness to them because you serve them with butter, jam, cream, so you don't need them to be overly sweet. And then next, because I like raisin scones, I'm gonna add in some raisins, now if you don't like raisins, feel free to leave them out, but you can also add in chocolate chips, maybe some frozen berries or even cherries would be really nice. And then just take a fork and then just mix these all together. What I like to do personally is put my hands in there and just make sure the butter is worked all the way throughout the flour, so then you really know what's going on. Okay, gorgeous. Fantastic. I'm just going to move this over to the side and we're going to mix up our wet ingredients. So in a jug I'm going to add in some full fat milk and some eggs and then whisk these ingredients together. Irish people are some of the biggest consumers of tea so it makes perfect sense that when we have a cup of tea we have a buttery scone to go with it. Often times you'd have it for lunch or even in the late afternoon, can't beat a good cup of tea and a scone. So now here is the trick about adding in liquid, maybe hold a little bit back, don't add it all in at once because once you add it in if your dough is too wet you can't take it back so just add in the majority of it and then see if you need that little bit extra what you're looking for here is not a soggy wet dough you're actually looking for something a little bit on the dry side and then we're going to pull it together with our hands so for those of you who don't know i went to a really famous cooking school in Ireland called Ballymaloe Cookery School run by a woman called Darina Allen and one of her big things when making scones and Irish soda bread was use a big claw. Just like in the movie Liar Liar when he has a claw, you want a big claw to pull your dough gently around. You don't want to overwork this dough and toughen your flour. You want it to be light and airy. Now I'm seeing already that my dough does need this little bit of reserved liquid so I'm just gonna go ahead and add that in there. And then pull my dough together with my hands until it forms a ball. So in no time at all my dough has come together, and any little loose bits I'll squish in there. Then I'm gonna turn it out onto my counter, lovely. Now if you want to just toss a little bit of flour on your work surface so your dough can move around. And then all I'm gonna do is with my hand, press it out until it's around an inch to an inch and a half thick, I like really thick scones. So just push it down with your hand, you don't even need a rolling pin for this. Super easy. why Irish Mammies like it, it's easy, all in one go, fantastic. Okie dokie. Once it's to the thickness that you want, I have my scone cutter here, this is around a 3 inch scone cutter so nice and big, and then just go ahead and cut out all of your scones. Look what lovely big shape they are. Now when I used to work in bakeries, one thing that we used to do, we used to make scones and then actually freeze them raw at this stage and then we would take them out, let them defrost for around 10-15 minutes and then pop them into the oven and you would have freshly baked off scones. So feel free to do that. So then you always have something nice in the freezer for when people drop in. Now always with scones you have a little bit of a knobbly bit of dough always left over so just kind of mushy him up together. You might get one more scone out of him, gorgeous. Then just put your scones onto a baking tray. So now here's a little trick that my mammy taught me. Rather than waste an egg for egg wash, I have a little bit of liquid left in my jug where I had the egg and the milk. So what I'm gonna do is dip my fingers in there, now don't judge me but my mom always used her fingers, she never used a brush. Which is funny because one of my pet peeves is actually washing pastry brushes, so I'm all about doing it this way. And then just gently glaze the top. This little bit of glaze will just make them golden brown and give them a lovely color. You just need a tiny bit. And what's the point in wasting an egg? Okay gorgeous! Our scones are ready to go into a hot oven. Take your scones off at 425°F or 210°C for roughly 10-12 minutes or until they're golden brown on the outside. So because the oven is so hot, scones take no time to cook at all and just check out these beauties. They are golden brown all over which means they're lovely and crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside which is exactly what you want from a scone. These are looking fantastic. Now in Ireland we go all out man, we take no prisoners. When it comes to scones, we have butter, jam, cream, the whole shebang. So just put whatever you want on here, I strongly recommend some Irish butter because it's nice and salty and really rich. Some jam, and you know what, you've gone this far, you may as well put cream on there too. This recipe is definitely new and improved, there is no doubt about it. They are buttery, fresh from the oven, they are warm and soft, and the outside is lovely and crunchy. This is what a scone should be. They say everyone is a little bit Irish on St. Patrick's Day, so make sure you enjoy the festivities and try out this recipe. Thank you so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed this extra Irish episode, and I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.