A recent book club meeting/morning tea was at China’s, (pronounced Cheena) and her wonderful scones were on the table again this time, with butter and lovely plum jam instead of the divine lemon curd aka lemon butter/aka lemon cheese she put out last time. They reminded me, I haven’t made scones in eons because I really still don’t understand the flours in Uruguay, and have a love/hate relationship with the oven, anyway.
However, looking for self saucing lemon pudding recipes as posted previously, I found a hand written scones recipe inside the back cover of my 1998 copy of the CWA Cookery Book & Household Hints about which I wrote a few weeks back.
One of the things I had to make for my Brownie Cook’s Badge was scones, and mine were good. I learned how to work the butter in by hand, using finger tips only, and working quickly so it didn’t melt while you were doing this. |Adding the milk had to be followed by quickly mixing with a knife – there’s no time to muck around while making scones. Gran always used the same old knife to mix hers. It was a kitchen knife or maybe even a carving knife, with a very old yellowed bone handle and an extremely worn down blade – who knows what shape it started out with, or what its original size was. Once quickly mixed the dough had to be turned out onto a floured board to be quickly and lightly rolled or hand pummelled. Using either an old glass or a cookie cutter for round shapes, or just cutting the dough into about 1″ thick squares or diamonds, these shapes were placed on a lightly greased oven tray, brushed with milk and popped into a preheated hot oven for about 10 minutes. They were taken out and wrapped in a cloth to cool without drying out. I used to be good at scones, and must have lost my touch for lack of practice.
On one of our many visits to Tasmania, possibly while we were still living in Kalgoorlie for the second time, so pre-1987, I think, Mike and I visited the Westbury Maze Tearoom on someone’s recommendation. I’m not sure exactly why we didn’t do the maze – perhaps it was because we only had time for the afternoon tea part! For some reason we’ve never popped in on subsequent visits to northern Tasmania – but the pictures of the maze look so good I think we must next time we go (we still have family and a few of the oldest, best kind of friends there) I am certain I wrote that actual recipe on a piece of paper years before, and years later sometime transferred it to this book to make sure it didn’t get lost.
Scones Recipe From The Maze Tearooms Westbury, Tasmania.
- 7 cups self raising flour
- 1 small carton fresh cream
- 1 can lemonade
- “some milk” – add in just enough to bring it to the right consistency
- quickly mix, roll out, cut etc
- cook in hot oven 10-15 minutes
Now, this makes quite a few scones, but they do freeze, just fine. But I needn’t have worried about the freezing of extras – they were like rocks and went straight into the bin. Despite Mike’s warnings I was certain that I’d written the ricipe correctly. But the ‘plain flour’ I’d written was so wrong, and clearly should have been SRF or had some baking soda in it. But I honestly thought, no, I felt sure, that I was right and that the lemonade in the recipe provided the necessary leavening.
Mike proved his warning was right by making another batch the next day, and those were gorgeous, which was quite irksome. Mum never swore, and ‘irksome’ was one of her favourite disparaging words, talk about understatement. We all know there are just a few sneaky people who cheerily hand on a recipe but leave out an essential ingredient, so it could have been industrial sabotage … or it could have just been poor note taking on my part, more likely I have to admit. I emailed the said tearooms for confirmation of the recipe, but for whatever reason they didn’t bother to reply, so never mind, they won’t miss us when we don’t pop into their maze.