Bertie's Bakery: scones

It’s a long weekend here in the States, “President’s Day”, and I am thankful for a long weekend! The Hubsters is a work-a-holic and long weekends are always a great for us to unwind.

This morning he is waking up to freshly baked Lemon Scones! But shhhh he doesn’t know this!

This is a very simple recipe, and if you have lemons in your fridge I would be willing to bet you have everything else that you need to go make these right now!

As always the recipe is located at the bottom, skip ahead if you want, otherwise enjoy the picture show!

1) First get out your butter. You don’t want your butter to be too soft, so don’t take out the butter too far in advance. It' needs to be in a state such that it can hold it’s shape without melting into the batter.

2) Put all of your dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and using a pastry cutter or two knives, start cutting the butting into the flour.

***You don’t want your butter mashed into the flour, instead it should look like crumbs. You will see the dough come together when you add the milk. In the meantime, the chunks of butter are what will eventually create a light and fluffy scone. When the scone is put in the oven to bake, the butter melts and leaves a cavity in the dough, thus leaving air pockets for a fluffy end product! Moral of the story, you are NOT trying to mash the butter in to flour to create a batter or dough… the milk will do that.

3) Once finished cutting in the butter, add your lemon zest and gently fork that into the mixture as well.

4) You are going to fold and cut the milk mixture into the flour until just combined. Do no over mix. Remember we are trying to save our butter chunks!

5) Then pour the batter out onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and shape into a circle.

6) For the sake of ease, make a pile of flour and dip your pie cutter into the flour before making each slice. Just trust me on this!

8) Last step, lightly brush the tops of the scone slices with an egg wash. This is an important step because the proteins in the wash help the scone develop a nice golden crust on top.

***Optional, I also shake out a little extra white sugar on top of scone after the egg wash.