No morning is complete for me without a cup or two of rich, full-bodied coffee. There’s something I love about that sharp, bitter aroma as seeps in through my senses and starts to clear the fog that’s settled in overnight. I even wake myself up early so I can have some time to slowly savor my steaming cup of coffee with its topnotes of cinnamon, cocoa, and butterscotch. But the real treat is when I pair it with its perfect complement, be it a muffin, a piece of biscotti or, my personal favorite, a scone.
I’ve tried to make scones a number of times, but it’s a bit more challenging process than making muffins or other breakfast pastries. The difficulty lies in the manner in which you have to incorporate the butter. The butter must be chilled, cut into small cubes, and then combined with the dry ingredients usually by using a [pastry cutter](http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/sku6510069/index.cfm?pkey=cctlpstdec). I’ve tried the process a number of times, and I’ve never gotten the texture quite right. According to the experts, it should look like coarse cornmeal when all is said and done. Mine always ended up being too lumpy–and, as I’ve learned one too many times, there’s no room for error in pastry recipes.
I stumbled across a scone recipe on [smittenkitchen.com](http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/09/the-north-fork-and-its-scones/) that suggested a new technique which I thought might clear up the problems I’ve had in the past: Use a [food processor](http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/e186/index.cfm?pkey=cfood-processors&ckey=food-processors) to combine the dry ingredients and the chilled butter. Fortunately, I bought a baby-sized (nine-cup capacity) food processor the other month, mostly with the idea that I would start making my own [hummus](http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Hummus-101577), [tapenade](http://www.olives101.com/2007/04/13/kalamata-olive-tapenade/), and [baba ganoush](http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2008/07/baba_ganosh.html). But it’s actually quite useful for a number of other things. So I decided to take on scones yet one more time–and, much to my surprise, these golden raisin and caraway scones turned out just fine. Even better than fine.
For this recipe, you’ll need **2 3/4 cups flour** (I used all purpose, but in the future I think I’d make them with whole wheat pasty flour.), **1/4 cup white sugar**, **turbinado sugar** (You’ll sprinkle this on the triangles of dough before they go in the oven.), **1 tablespoon baking powder**, **1 teaspoon baking soda**, **6 ounces (1 1/2 sticks) butter**, chilled and cut into small cubes, **1 cup golden raisins** and **1 tablespoon caraway seeds** (If I were to make these again, I might switch it up with dried apricots. Mostly because I’m obsessed with finding new ways to incorporate dried apricots into my cooking and baking. Of course, you could always use 1 cup of fresh fruit in place of the dried fruit.), and **1 cup buttermilk**.
The first thing you’ll want to do is put all the dry ingredients (except the raisins) into the food processor with the butter cubes and pulse the mixture until it resembles coarse cornmeal (see the bowl on the left). Now, if you don’t have a food processor (which I’m assuming most of you don’t), a blender works just as well. If you don’t have a food processor or a blender the extremely painstaking and frustrating alternative is to use two knives to literally cut the butter into tiny crumbs. In my experience, this is next to impossible…
I suppose you could always pilfer a food processor or a blender from mom and dad. This tends to work well, especially if they don’t do an inventory of their kitchen appliances that often. Or, if your parents are at all like mine, they haven’t touched most of their kitchen appliances since the 80s. They didn’t notice for at least six months when I stealthily stole away with their griddle/waffle maker. But I digress.
After the food processor bit, all you have to do is transfer the mixture to a large bowl, fold in the raisins, add the buttermilk, and stir together just until a soft dough forms. You’ll want to knead the dough on a floured surface a few times and then pat it down into a one-inch thick slab. Then use a cookie cutter or a knife to slice the dough into pieces.
Transfer the scones to a pan lined with parchment paper (or you could just lightly grease the pan). Top the scones off with a few teaspoons of turbinado sugar and bake for 25-30 minutes at 375 degrees. You’ll know the scones are done when they’ve risen a bit and turned a lovely golden color.
These scones are unique in that they have a toasted, crusty outer layer and a moist, almost cake-like crumb on the inside–but they’re not nearly as overwhelmingly sweet as the scones you’ll often find in coffee shops.
