52 Cookbooks #6: Cheese and sun-dried tomato scones

Like Mary from Keynko (who's hosting this challenge) I've also chosen a Nigella book this week. I've chosen her How to be a Domestic Goddess book, which has a great title but I one that I rarely manage to achieve!

And I definitely didn't while cooking these scones!  I love scones. And unusually fancied something savory. Liking the odd deviation from a recipe I was pleased to see that Nigella had given variations at the bottom of the recipe so it could be pimped any which way. I fancied some cheese scones and not content with the single variation chose to add some chopped sun-dried tomatoes too.

I decided to use my food processor and use the pulse button so the dough was still light and didn't become over-worked. The square scone I ate at the V&A earlier this week was very light and fluffy and nothing like the dense supermarket versions, and I'd forgotten how good light and fluffy scones are. 

It was going well, too well. 

I added my cheese which I'd cleverly also grated using the food processor before starting, then bang... I'd knocked the jar of sun-dried tomatoes over. The ones in olive oil. I now had sun-dried tomato olive oil spreading everywhere over the work top, so needed to stop, mop up and clean this up regretting my genius idea to add them to the recipe at all...

However I got there and ended up with a baking tray full of lovely delights of varying sizes as I'd used each of the cutters to make the best use of all the dough. 

And yes, I'd cut two of the largest size before realising I was using the wrong sized cutter! Unfortunately my work top looked less impressive than the scones. 

With their egg wash on the scones were in the oven and they only needed to cook for ten minutes (this could have been a really speedy recipe if it weren't for the oil incident!) I snuck a peek at them and wow, they were definitely doing their own thing in the oven!

In the recipe Nigella warns that they look as if they have cellulite. Before they went in the oven I was feeling a bit smug as mine didn't seem to. And as we all know, smugness gets us nowhere. Not even close to domestic goddess status. But I'm glad she warned me, look how they turned out:

There's a definite whiff of homemade about them, which I think is a very good thing!!

The verdict 

  • They taste fab and are... light and fluffy! Yay!
  • I'd follow this recipe for scones again as it was quick and easy
  • I'd use the food processor again too
  • I'd probably try to avoid knocking sun-dried tomato olive oil everywhere 
  • I'd take extra care to ensure the top of the scones were flat, rather than ignoring steps in the dough, as I think this could be why some have "risen" so wildly. 
  • Yum, yum, yum!