HOW TO MAKE SCONES | basic scone recipe

Hi guys I'm Betty from BakerBettie.com and welcome back to another video. Now today we are going to learn how to make scones and this is the last video in our quick bread series. Now in the previous video we learned all about the biscuit mixing method as we learned how to make American style butter biscuits and we are going to be using that same mixing method today to make our scones. Now if you compare a scone recipe with a biscuit recipe you will notice that there are quite a few similarities but the main difference being is that our scones are going to include some sugar as well as an egg which is going to give us a little bit of a different texture and flavor. Now the scones we are making today are what would be considered an American style bakery scone because they are going to include some add-ins but you can feel free to leave these plain if you want something that is closer to a European style scone. So let's go ahead and dive into the recipe. Now to start our scones we are going to combine all of our dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl and whisk those together. So I have two cups of all-purpose flour here and that is going to be the main structure of our scones. I also have a half cup of granulated sugar which is just going to sweeten the scones slightly. I have a half teaspoon of salt to round out our flavors and then I have one full tablespoon of baking powder which is going to be the thing that really gives our scones a lot of lift and is going to love in them. So now you just want to whisk all of that together until it is well combined. Now if you wanted to add any kind of spices into your scones like cinnamon or clove you could add those in at this point as well. So our next step is to cut our cold butter into our flour mixture. So I have one stick which is four ounces of cold unsalted butter that I have cut up into small pieces and I'm just going to add this into our flour mixture and I am using a pastry cutter to cut this into the flour. Now if you don't have a pastry cutter you can use a fork and you just want to cut this in until it is the texture of coarse meal. Now the purpose of cutting our butter into our flour mixture serves several purposes. The first is that the butter is going to coat the flour in fat creating a barrier from the liquid to help reduce gluten development. This is going to keep our scones really light and tender. The second is that it will distribute little pieces of fat throughout our scones which will melt in the oven creating little pockets of flakiness. So you can see here that the fat is cut into the flour to create a texture like a coarse meal and that's the reason why we really want our fat to be cold before we do this process because we want it to stay solid as it's cut into our flour. We don't want to create a cohesive dough. We want all of those little pieces of fat throughout which is going to create a lot of flakiness in our scones. So now if you are going to add any add-ins into your dough you would want to do it at this point. You can think of this recipe sort of as a blank canvas for anything you want to add into it. You could add berries, nuts, chocolate chips, or dried fruit. Anything really that you can think of and I'm going to be using some frozen blueberries for these scones. Now if I am going to add berries I like to use frozen because it does help keep the dough really cold and it's easier to keep them intact when you are making the scone dough but if you only have fresh available you can also use that. So I'm adding one cup of frozen blueberries into my mixture and I'm just going to toss those to combine. Our next step is to combine all of our wet ingredients together. So I have a half a cup of heavy cream here and this is going to add some moisture and a lot of richness into our scone. Now I'm adding to my cream one large egg and this is going to really help bind our scones together and you'll notice this is one of the ingredients that was not in our biscuit recipe and our biscuits are a bit of a more crumbly texture than the scones will be because of that egg. Now I'm going to also add into our wet ingredients some lemon juice along with some lemon zest. Now this is really going to pair well with the blueberries in our scones but you can use any flavoring you like or keep them plain. Some vanilla extract would be really nice in these especially if you are adding something like chocolate chips into your scones. So now I'm just going to whisk all of this together until it's well combined and then we will add it into our dry mixture. Now you just want to add the wet ingredients right into the bowl with the dry ingredients and mix this together just until combined. And just like our biscuits you really don't want to over mix this so we're just going to give it a few turns with the spatula and then we will be dumping it out onto our countertop to form it. Now you can see here that the mixture is really crumbly and kind of shaggy but that's perfect. It will come together on the countertop. Just lightly flour your countertop and dump all of your dough out. Now flour your hands and bring all of the dough together into one piece. Be gentle with this. And once you have all of the dough gathered into the center we are going to create some folds in the dough. So press it out to about an inch thick. Now fold the dough in half. Now it's going to be very crumbly at this point but it will start coming together as we do a few folds. So give it a 90 degree turn and gently press it out again. You don't want to break all of those berries. A few of them might break but that's okay but just be gentle with it. Okay and now fold the dough again in half and if you need to you can lightly flour it and do this about three more times for about a total of six folds. Okay so now I'm going to form this into a circle and pat it down to about one inch thick. Now we're just going to cut the dough into eight triangles. Now I'm going to be using my bench knife here and this is a really handy tool to have when you are baking but you could also use a knife. So just cut it in half and then in half again and then you're going to cut each quarter in half to make eight scones. Now gently transfer these over to a parchment lined baking sheet. Before these go into the oven I am brushing them with a little bit of cream and I'm going to dust them with some sanding sugar which will give a nice crunchy texture over the top and a little extra sweetness. Now I have my oven preheated to 425 degrees Fahrenheit and that high temperature is what is going to help these puff up really nicely so now I'm just going to bake them until they are golden brown. The scones just came out of the oven and they took about 15 minutes to get nice and golden brown and you can see how puffy and light and tender they are. Now these are perfect as is but you could also make a simple powdered sugar glaze to pour on these by just mixing powdered sugar with a little bit of lemon juice until it is a pourable consistency. Now I think scones kind of get a bad rap for being too dense, too dry, and crumbly. These are not like that at all and that is all in the mixing method. We want to start with really cold ingredients. You want to be really gentle with your dough and not mix it too much and you're going to get these scones that are so puffy and light and tender and moist. They're buttery, they're slightly crispy on the outside, and they're so tender on the inside and you are absolutely going to love these. Now I really hope you enjoyed this recipe tutorial. If you did make sure you give it a thumbs up and I'm always happy to answer any of your questions. You can leave those in the comment section and if you aren't already subscribed make sure you hit that subscription button and ring the notification bell so you never miss a video. You can also follow me at Baker Betty on Instagram and on Facebook and I will be back next week with another recipe tutorial. I'll see you guys then. Bye!