Tag Archives: Cheese Scones

Friday I’m in Love

Tearing, sharing cheese and seed scones

We go to The Cure for this one – not my natural territory, but the song seems to have hovered at t5he back of my mind for years, a truly haunting song. After posting the Thursday post, I had second thoughts about the baking plans. I had enough trays to bake scones, I decided, and the oven wouldn’t be on for long. Above all, Julia had said when would like scones and I always think that it’s a good thing to do what your wife wants.

It turned into a bit of a disaster while I was getting the ingredients out of our badly stacked and over-stuffed cupboards. They are very deep cupboards and hard to stack in an accessible manner. It’s not helped by the fact tat we are starting to buy the Christmas staples The first problem was a jar of cranberry sauce fell out. I could feel the vibrations from impact, but it, fortunately, missed my toes. The jar also survived. The same spillage meant we ended up with curry powder spilled on the floor. The dustpan doesn’t meet the floor well and fine powders tend to miss the pan so I went to get the small vacuum. This needed emptying before I could use it. Twenty minutes later, needing a new bag of flour after making the fruit scones, I needed more flour.

Scones at Minsmere

An open bag of sugar came off the top shelf as I took a new bag of flour. It hit one of the lower shelves on the way down. It split, and opened up, somersaulted, and came to rest on the floor. There was sugar in the cupboard from the shelf collision, sugar (extensively) on the floor and the small vacuum came into play. For a moment I toyed with the idea of putting teh sugar back in the bag as Julia had cleaned the floors that morning, but civilisation won and I hoovered it up and emptied it into the bin.

Now, I employ a simple system when baking. I put the bowl on the scales, tare it back to zero and add the ingredients. Liquid measurements, in the metric system, are easy and I just change millilitres of liquid into grams. I jsut keep adding stuff until it is all in the bin. Sometimes I use mental arithmetic to get a cumulative figure, sometimes I tare the scales again. However, after cleaning up the sugar, I found the scales had automatically switched off and I could only vaguely remember it was on about 160 when I stopped. Though it might have been 180. They look similar whe you aren’t really watching. Added to the uncertainty of the recipe (I’d altered the fruit scone recipe to accommodate cheese), I ended up adjusting the dough with a little more milk at the end.

Scones – John Lewis

And I had to use made mustard instead of the powder. That actually mixed well and worked better than the mustard powder.

The cheese scones were very good and rose quite well. The fruit scones didn’t rise as they should have done. I’m not sure what happened. The old recipe I used had oil in it and worked fine. I have to use oil because I can’t work butter in with arthritic fingers, so I don’t want to look for a different recipe. I did see one on a website that reputedly produced nice light scones and used oil but it’s an American recipe and will need converting from cups. IT also uses twice as much flour and will make too many scones. Two pensioners and a visiting sister don’t need that many scones and I don’t want to start freezing them as I always forget to defrost in time.

More did happen, but will leave that for another post. Or forget it.

Before batching – Date and Stilton Scones – like the seeded cheese scones in the header picture, these were from the Homegrown Cereals Authority recipe booklet I have mislaid and were baked together so they formed a batched scone suitable for “tearing and sharing”. They were quite easy to form by hand and I am thinking of going back to that as using cutters can cause problems.

Scones are from previous posts.

I Have Had Worst days

17 Replies

Bad Biscuits from a previous Nightmare

Today I woke up with plans. The morning passed in a bit of a blur, with not much done. We had a nice cooked breakfast, because I’ve been struggling to get grocery levels down to something reasonable. With my tendency to over-order, and Julia being away last week, the fridge has filled up and the cupboards are beginning to bulge.

This called for a breakfast of toast, beans, mushrooms, scrambled egg and sausages. It started off as toast, beans and scrambled egg, which the internet tells me is a nutritious breakfast that will keep you full for ages. Then I realised I had a pack of mushrooms in the cupboard, and most of one in the fridge. Then I found the short-dated sausages . . .

Baked Eggs imitating a mixed omlette

Having bought a Large Cauliflower last week, which turned out to be an accurate description for once, we have a lot of cauliflower, despite making it the main part of a meal last week. Most times when you order the large one it turns out to be either Adequate or Disappointingly Small. I made cauliflower cheese for three on Friday night and still have a chunk of cauliflower the size of Julia’s head. I would make soup, but we are still going through the broccoli and bits soup I made on Friday. It consisted of wilted broccoli and the core of the cauliflower plus the tender leaves, with onions, garlic and the green bits of some leeks. It’s made a broccoli-flavoured soup and is quite decent. We were able to redress the calorific debacle of breakfast by having soup in the evening.

Meanwhile, I had been planning on amazing you with photographs of scones. You may have noticed there are no photos of scones. The plan did noy go well.

First I made cheese scones using a recipe I had taken from the internet. It was a recipe for ordinary scones but I left out the fruit and sugar and added cheese and mustard powder. It seemed to go OK. The next batch, where I used the original fruit recipe, did not go so well, nd left me with a very wet dough. The cheese ones didn’t rise and the fruit ones oozed a bit, and also failed to rise. They taste fine, but they are not photogenic. They are also difficult to cut in half to butter.

Summer pudding after the first slice

I then did Bread Pudding. Julia likes Bread Pudding but dislikes Bread and Butter pudding. They are two different things according to her and the internet. One consists of bread, butter, milk, eggs, sugar and dried fruit. The other consists of bread, butter, milk, eggs, sugar and dried fruit. They are not, as I pointed out, that far apart. Bread Pudding uses cubes of bread which are scrunched up, and the butter is melted and poured in to the mix. In Bread and Butter Pudding the bread is sliced and buttered. It also, to me, tastes the same. Do you remember the story in Gulliver’s Travels where two groups fell out over whether to eat their boiled eggs from the pointy end or the blunt end? Exactly.

And now I am going to put the day of culinary disappointment behind me and go to bed. It’s very depressing when you start baking again after a break and find your former skills have deserted you.

Meanwhile, we are still ripening our tomatoes indoors. These, of course, are from a previous year.

These are the Scones

19 Replies

Yes, they don’t look like scones, but they are.

The original recipe for these came from the Home Grown Cereals Authority (HGCA) and seemed to be just the sort of recipe I was looking for, as it included some teaching points and was an easy recipe for a class to do.

I can’t find the original recipe on the internet as I can’t get a working link to the HGCA, but this link seems to have the same recipe as I remember it. I have a vague feeling that the HGCA recipe might have had mustard powder in it to accentuate the taste of the cheese.

And I probably used self-raising flour because it’s easier than using baking powder.

Seeds, flour, cheese – at one time I had aspirations to write a book on food

They use rapeseed oil instead of butter, which makes it a quicker and easier recipe, and allows discussion of oilseed rape as a crop, the perils of monoculture, EU grants (at the time), self-sufficiency in food production and plant breeding. It’s also sold as vegetable oil in supermarkets as the word rape isn’t seen as being particularly positive from a marketing point of view, and Canola oil in the USA. IT also makes it easier to make if you have arthritic fingers. I was just starting to develop arthritis in the final year on the farm and my fingers would ache after a long baking session.

The recipe, with seeds and cheese is quite pleasant and always went down well. I used to cook them for the group when we were on the farm because everyone likes to tear off a warm scone. From a practical point of view it is easier to do them this way than to use a cutter as a scone cutter won’t cut seeds and things get a bit messy. If you go for a rustic tear and share look nobody notices that they are messy.

With a different selection of seeds

I have used the recipe to make successful fruit scones and developed the recipe for date and Stilton scones. It’s a bit fiddly because you have to cut the dates into smaller pieces and crumble the Stilton, but it worked quite well. Initially I halved the quantity of cheese when using Stilton, because it’s a strong tasting cheese. That strength of flavour doesn’t really come through in a scone and we ended up going back to using the full amount.

Before batching – Date and Stilton Scones

I seem to have used flax seed in the mix. I don’t honestly remember doing that but the camera doesn’t lie. It also seems that I cut the narrow end of the cheese off for cookery, which is frowned on. You are supposed to cut it along the length of the wedge so that everyone gets a bit of the outer edge and a bit of the central part of the cheese, which is supposedly riper than the outer edge. .

Despite this, I remember that they tasted good and that I thought this was the start of me becoming a cook and food blogger. In hindsight, life can be very cruel.

Date and Stilton scone with at least one pumpkin seed in it.

If I can get any flour I’m feeling inspired to make these again.

Yes, a single pumpkin seed. Worrying. It suggests I didn’t clean the bowl properly between mixes.

The plates were part of a set my mother got as a promotional offer from Boots. She didn’t use them much and passed them on to us. We didn’t use them much and passed them on the the farm. I once put one in the microwave – the silver line around the rim produced some alarming sparks. At that point I remembered my mother telling me not to use them in the microwave. I didn’t forget again.

Baking brings back a lot of memories.

A touch of cookery

10 Replies

Apart from the weather (see previous post) it’s been a good day, with a possible new member coming to have a look at us. It was a good day to visit, as we had had a cooking session planned, which ended with us eating cheese scones and lavender biscuits.

Yes, the same lavender biscuits and cheese scones we have been cooking for a couple of weeks now, but people like them and we have the ingredients.

This is the recipe for the scones – it’s an easy one because it uses rapeseed oil (or canola if you want the American translation) instead of butter. It’s therefore probably healthier for you (though these food fads could be reversed next week), cheaper and considerably easier. My scones never reach that “fine crumb” stage, on account of having hands like bunches of bananas.

Please note at this point – I’m using the cheapest oil for this recipe as it doesn’t need a quality oil. In fact I use the cheapest oil for most purposes – we are self-sufficient in it and that’s a good enough reason for me to think of changing from olive oil if all else is equal.

As usual, it’s difficult to tell where the truth lies because the we internet contains a web of science, lies and stupidity that makes it tricky to see the truth. Good luck if you’re the sort of person who likes to base decisions on all the facts, because you’re going to have plenty of hard work looking for them.

The lavender biscuits contain flour, sugar, lavender and butter.

I can’t link to the recipe because Julia has it on a scrap of paper, but there are plenty of recipes about if you want one.

Next step for the scones is to try blue cheese and pear and Stilton and date. Next step for the lavender biscuits is to try a recipe with rosemary.

If you don’t hear any more about them you can take it that they failed.

If the blog stops, you can take it that they were fatal…

Meanwhile, here are some pictures of our fruit and veg, which is finally coming to life. And a cricket – we don’t actually eat them.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Finally, on a sadder note, we lost two chicks today and we aren’t sure why. The keets are looking well and if they are still OK by Wednesday they should be safe. Fingers crossed.

Toddlers, scones and grants

4 Replies

Another day, another group!

What, you didn’t think I was going to relax did you? It was a playgroup today, Beavers on Tuesday night and the second half of the playgroup on Thursday. It’s not quite the endurance test that last week was, but it’s enough. Much as I’d like to indulge my natural talents as a world class slacker, I have to work when there are wages to be had.

The trouble with playgroups is that the kids zip around like miniature demons looking for mischief to get into. They don’t mean it, but it seems logical to them to lose their parent, fill a friend’s pocket with stones or disappear as you turn your back. They think adventure, the parents think tragedy and I think reams of paperwork. Fortunately they never seem to come to any harm, but you worry all the same.

We made more cheese scones today, using the “mistake” from the session on Saturday. One of the guide groups had used a tablespoonful of baking powder to 225g of flour instead of 1 teaspoon. All it needed was 450g of flour to restore the proportions and three of us set to work producing scones, which were then consumed at the end of the day. They were OK, but not very cheesy, which is a bit of a let-down for a recipe labelled “cheese scones”.

The scone crew

It’s always been a reliable recipe, and I suspect that they main problem was the quality of the cheese and lack of other seasoning. When I’ve made them before I’ve often added either mustard powder or chives to the mix, which both enhance flavour. In the case of the mustard it also renders the scones implausibly yellow. I generally use the cheap ready-grated cheese from Tesco, so can’t complain about the cheese. I’m thinking of making them with either finely cubed strong cheddar or Stilton next time, rather than grated, to see what happens.

The problem is that I’ve baked cheese scones twice in three days and my enthusiasm for testing improved versions is declining to the point where I don’t actually want to see another one for a while.

Talking of Stilton, our local cheese, I wonder what will happen to its protected status. Say what you like about the EU, and let’s face it, a lot has been said recently, it has been good for protecting our speciality food.

Leading on from that, we have had a message about ringing to talk about our grant application now the referendum is over. Can’t wait to see what happens about that…

Six!

4 Replies

At last. I love my job, but after six visits in six days you can have too much of a good thing.

As it happens, the 1st Calverton Guides have been here more than any other group, so it wasn’t a difficult day. Out to the chicks, on to the workshop (because I’m trying to sell the idea of coming out to build nest boxes) and into a technical session on eggs. It was their misfortune to be used as guinea pigs for my new presentation. They said it was fine, but the glazed expressions suggested I might need to do a bit more work on it. Fortunately Julia has just taken delivery of a box of egg resources, though I didn’t feel confident enough to open it and start using it without practice.

The goats got out twice, which provided some light relief, and England beat Australia 44-40 to mark what is probably a false dawn in English Rugby. It’s good, and it looks like a cracking game from the reports, but it won’t be the first time an English sports team has failed to build on success. That has nothing to do with the day really, but it felt good to write “England beat Australia”. having said that, after Thursday’s vote on leaving the EU I’d better start being nice to the Australians as we now need them for more than just bar work.

The afternoon cookery session was seeded cheese scones using rapeseed oil (or vegetable oil as the Bowdlerised version has it). It’s a recipe from the Home Grown Cereals Authority, based on the fact that we are self-sufficient in oilseed rape and that it is less fatty than butter. I like it because it’s easier than rubbing in butter.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

They must have liked it because we are already discussing the next date – all I need to do is find another activity to do!

So, it looks like I managed to end on a high note, though that was mainly due to the chicks once more. Personal high point of the day was when they did the washing up for me – after six days of visits that was a big positive.

Now I’d better get working on next week’s visits and on cleaning the incubator.

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm