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Maple syrup scones with strawberries

I could eat scones for breakfast every day for the rest of my life.

Alright, slight overstatement, I could probably do it for the next month, and then I might have to move on to muffins. But while I’m still crazy for scones, I think I’ll keep trying new recipes like the one I’ve featured today.

Today’s treat comes from Heidi Swanson’s simple recipe for maple syrup scones on her blog 101 Cookbooks. I chose it because I’ve been trying to use mostly all-natural ingredients (nothing artificial, nothing heavily processed, no preservatives) as well as whole wheat and whole grain products in my baking. This requires a bit of extra work as far as gathering the right brands and adjusting recipes to the idiosyncrasies of all-natural baking. Here’s where Swanson comes in. She literally wrote the book on this–her 2007 cookbook Super Natural Cooking, which I hope to buy at some point this summer.

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Luckily, I already have my pantry stocked with some of the basic all-natural baking supplies, including unbleached finely ground whole wheat flour (I also love working with whole wheat pastry flour, available at your local Whole Foods, but I didn’t have any on hand.), almond meal, flax meal, raw sugar, real maple syrup, organic molasses, organic honey and so on. It may be a bit more expensive to buy these particular ingredients, but if you look closely and compare brands and learn to shop around a bit, the difference will be negligible, and the payoff worth it.

Ever since I bought my two pints of strawberries on Saturday, I had been mulling over what to make. First, I wanted to put together a strawberry banana split muffin. I would take my basic banana chocolate chip muffin, add a cup or two of strawberries and top it off with a vanilla-almond icing. I decided against that when I came across a recipe for strawberry whole wheat scones on A Dash of Sass, but instead of listing her recipe the author posted a link to Heidi Swanson’s blog. So that was my journey to the present recipe.

Maple syrup scones with strawberries

You’ll need 1/4 cup real maple syrup, 6 tablespoons cream or milk (I prefer to use heavy cream, but I only had 2% milk on hand.), 2 1/4 cups whole wheat pastry flour, 1/2 cup quinoa flakes or rolled oats (I had neither so I substituted 1/4 cup of flax meal for good measure.), 1 1/2 tablespoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt or table salt, 11 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes, 1 egg, beaten, 1 cup diced strawberries and raw sugar (I like the Sugar in the Raw brand.) for sprinkling atop the scones for added texture and subtle sweetness.

In a medium-sized bowl, stir together all your dry ingredients. Then, using your fingers, a pastry cutter, two knives or a food processor, cut the butter into the dry ingredients until it looks like there are little pebbles among the finer grains. You don’t want it to be pulverized, because the small pieces of butter make it flaky. Add the strawberries in and mix until they are fully coated with the dry ingredients. In a small cup, whisk together your cream or milk and the maple syrup and then put pour it all in with the dry ingredients.

The key to getting scones right involves the next few steps: Stir until a soft dough forms. You’ll want a dough that sticks together and doesn’t have too much of the dry ingredients still sitting around it. In order to get it right, you’ll need to add an extra tablespoon or two of cream or milk as you see fit while you are softly turning the dough in the bowl using your hands. After this, knead the dough a few times on a surface dusted with flour. Then shape the dough into a 1″ thick square or rectangle, making sure to shape the sides. Don’t leave them crumbly, just trim the edges if you need to. Cut the dough into nine blocks roughly equal in size. Place them 1/2″ apart on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper or greased with butter. Last, swipe a generous amount of the egg wash on the scones and top each with about a teaspoon of raw sugar. Bake them for 20 to 25 minutes at 400 degrees.

While these are baking, the sweet aroma of butter and maple syrup will waft through the house, potentially drawing your roommates out of their rooms to ask what’s baking and whether they can have some. At least that’s what mine did.

The results

To be honest, I was pleased with the scones but I wouldn’t rush to my friends gushing about my latest baking masterpiece. In other words, I’d make a few adjustments to the recipe next time to perfect them.

The strawberries cooked down so much that they didn’t retain their flavor in the scones, which really disappointed me. I’m torn as to how to fix this. I could make the strawberries a bit larger or I suppose I could just eliminate the strawberries altogether in favor of my old standbys–dried fruits.

The scones also ended up being denser than they should have been. I didn’t really get the degree of flakiness that one would expect of scones–indeed, the flakiness that makes a scone a scone. This would be something a bit trickier to fix. My guess is that the problem lies in my use of regular whole wheat flour rather than whole wheat pastry flour. While I’m not familiar with the differences in chemistry, I know that whole wheat flour, when used in full rather than in part, can make your baked goods much heaver than they should be. Two solutions: Try making them with the aforementioned whole wheat pastry flour or unbleached white flour.

One last criticism. I was expecting that the real maple syrup would add a noticeable depth and complexity to the scones. Put bluntly, not so. One way of adding dimension and body to the flavor of the scones would be a simple addition of 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract or 1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract. The difference between the two? In my experience, almond extract is significantly more potent than vanilla. Now that I think about it, these would be fantastic with whole fresh cherries and the 1/2 teaspoon almond extract. I love that cherry-almond combination.

However, this time I’ll most likely top my scones off with a simple icing to help counter the dryness and the thickness of the scone. Hopefully next time, I’ll end up with a lighter, flakier, more flavorful scone.

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