A perfect afternoon

I am a big fan of the rain when I’ve got nothing urgent to do.  We’ve got some real big windows in our flat, and sometimes I’ll just sit and watch the rain bounce off the stone floor.  So when I woke up the other morning and heard the rain, I put off everything I had been planning on doing, made a new plan, and set out to do it.  This new plan wasn’t particularly challenging.  It involved nothing more that buying enough milk to make some scones, and then timing it so that I was making the scones whilst the afternoon play was on the radio.  It was a delicate operation.  I made sure I had all my ingredients, laid them out on the kitchen table, washed my hands, made a cup of tea, and turned the radio on as the closing music of the archers faded out.  Perfect.

And so I sat, watching the rain and rubbing together fat and flour, dividing up my mixture for a few different flavours of scone.  My tray was greased and floured.  And then, in the calm of my kitchen, disaster struck.  I wanted a teaspoon of salt.  Just a teaspoon, but those stupid bags of salt never do what you ask, and suddenly my whole bowl of flour was coated in a fine white dusting.  The calm, however swiftly returned, as I spent about ten minutes just scooping salt out of my flour, I mean, I had forty five minutes till the play was over, and really, it was wonderfully relaxing.  I reweighed my flour, adjusted the quantity (inevitably my salt mining picked up a little debris on the way) and got back to my scone making.

One of the things I really love about baking is how you have so much time, until you add one ingredient, and then you know it’s all about getting it in the oven as soon as you can.  So, I’d added the milk, the chemistry was taking place.  My scone mixture was patted down, swiftly but surely.  And then a pause.  Do I have any cutters?  The answer is, of course, no.  When I first moved into the flat, living by myself, I didn’t really feel like there was all that much point in buying much baking equipment.  It’s pretty difficult to scale baking recipes down for one person, and it turned out that whenever I did fancy baking some biscuits and saving them for a week or so in the biscuit tin, I invariably ate the whole lot within a couple of days.  So I had some time off baking, which worked out quite well, as my problems with eggs reached their peak.

So the scones took the shape of little, slightly irregular and in no way dainty, triangles and were slipped into the oven.  Timer set, I opened the cupboard for a wire rack.  Of course I don’t have a wire rack.  I don’t know why I thought there would be one there.  Because there never was.  Luckily, though, I was very hungry when they came out of the oven, and my tea guest had just arrived.  So we ate them warm from the oven, with jam and butter, and some good Yorkshire tea, with skimmed milk of course.  The play was over, the lack of equipment was forgotten, and we simply ate lovely scones.

Scones

Makes 12 chunky scones

500g plain flour

2 tblspoon baking powder

110g cubed butter

pinch of salt

300ml whole milk

2 tablespoons of sugar

two handfuls of blueberries, 80g of raisins

or

omit the sugar and instead add 80g of grated cheese

Preheat the oven to 180c

In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder together.

Rub the cubed butter into the flour mixture until you've got a bowl looking full of fine breadcrumbs. 

Stir through the cheese, raisins, or blueberries.

Make a well in the middle, add the milk, and quickly mix to make a soft, but not sticky, dough.  Add more flour if it's to wet, more milk or water if it's too dry.

Tip onto a floured surface and roll to about 3cm thick.  Shape into whatever shape you fancy.

Brush all over with a little milk or beaten egg.  If sweat, top with a sprinkling on sugar, if cheesy, some more grated cheese on top.

Bake for 15 minutes.