Tag Archives: scones

Wednesday Week

Mince pies – time to start testing

Yes, it’s Wednesday, sometimes called “Hump Day” according to the internet. This may be true in the USA but here we just call it Wednesday. It wouldn’t be accurate for me anyway, as a lot of my working life has encompassed Saturdays and Sundays. The track is Wednesday Week by the Undertones. It’s one of those songs that you remember when you put it on. Otherwise it just slips you mind.

Not much happened today. I did a few minor bits and pieces and looked for my motivation. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it, but I did find some cheese on toast and two boxes of junk to sort out. I now have just one box of junk, so it hasn’t been a wasted day. However, do not fear – I still have plenty more to sort out.

Foodwise, I am on 22 plant based food sources, with four of them being things I didn’t eat last week. I’ve not made such a thing of it this week as I did last week. Avocado for lunch and a decent helping of veg for tea tomorrow night should see me most of the way there. I haven’t planned as well as I did last week so I may have a few things less than last week but it will still be over 30. It feels a bit like failure, but you can’t keep finding new things to eat without proper planning. This week I thought I’d just coast along and see what happened, so I’m not too disappointed. I have still done 30.

Baking tomorrow – Julia wants cheese scones, I want banana and walnut loaf and I’m thinking of doing an apple bread pudding. Then maybe a rice pudding, fruit scones or a ginger cake. It’s a case of using all the oven space. If I’m going to have the oven on I may as well fill it. The main problem will be finding enough energy to eat it all.

I Have Had Worst days

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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.

Some Feelgood Photos

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Stilton and Date Scones

Yes, I admit that I could have included kittens, puppies and seals, or even smiling babies and teddy bears, but none of them really make me as happy as pictures of home baking. I really should start doing more of it, but my hands make it difficult. Maybe a mixer is in order. I could also have included pictures of Julia but that would just be sentimental, and, let’s face it, most people would rather see scones.

The scones in the picture above are Date and Stilton Cheese scones – my own recipe. They are better than they sound, in case you don’t like Stilton, because the Stilton flavour doesn’t really come out in them. If you do like Stilton they are slightly disappointing, for the same reason.

Grantham Gingerbreads

Tricky biscuits because they are supposed to open up and be hollow in the middle. I’ve never quite got that right, though they taste OK and look alright on the outside. Only made them twice because, to be honest, they are more trouble than they are worth.

Peppermint Creams

I like peppermint creams but I may as well just inject myself with glucose syrup as they are basically just sugar with a bit of extra effort thrown in. The most important thing about making them was that they pick up any bit of loose colour in the cooking area. They even managed to take up blue from the chequered table covering.

Gingerbread Men

Probably should be called gingerbread people in these days of political concern. Or Gender Fluid Gingers, as there is no actual indication of gender. This would probably annoy people with ginger hair…

OK, they are biscuits with ginger in them. Since when did biscuits get so political?

Wheatsheaf Loaf (with mouse)

Mouse on Wheatsheaf Loaf

These are useless because you can’t actually eat them, but they were always nice to make. Not only was it good to feel artistic for once, bu it was nice to be part of an ancient tradition.

The Scone Chronicles – 39 A Box from Bettys

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I’m torn between wonder that I have got to Number 39, and a sense of lost that Covid has presented me getting to Number 70, which is where it ought to be. I could try harder, and I didn’t even photograph the scones – just the gift box. It’s even taken me a month to get round to writing it up.

The Scones in question arrived in a small cardboard box from Bettys in Harrogate. My sister had ordered them on line as a treat for us. no particular reason, just because she’s a nice person. I will refer to it as a hamper, despite it being disguised as a cardboard box.

Bettys Hamper – tea, scones, cake and jam

The blue box contains tea, the brown protects the jar of strawberry jam and the other two explain themselves.

The scones had been in transit for a day and it took us another day to get clotted cream(if you’re going to have afternoon tea you may as well have all the calories and fat that go with it. Despite this, and my sister’s worries, they were still fresh.

They were also very good.

Unfortunately, Bettys advertise themselves in a way that suggests they are the best in the world, and they aren’t. Generally I’d be happy with scones that were this good, but Bettys make a rod for their own back – they really need to up their game if they want to match the adverts.. See here for more comments on this, and for a comment on the dropping of the apostrophe in the name – this criticism still stands. If you can’t be bothered to put an apostrophe in your logo what else can’t you be bothered to do?

The jam was excellent, as good as any strawberry jam I’ve ever had. It’s quite runny and has an intense flavour that grabs you under the ears (“meks yer tabs laugh” as they say in Nottingham). Top marks for that.

Same goes for the Yorkshire Tea Loaf – very good. We actually bought more scones and managed to make the contents of the box into three afternoon teas, which was even better than just having it for one. It was jam and cream scones the first day. jam and cream scone with Tea Loaf for the second day and jam scones with tea loaf the second day. It lasted well.

The tea, I’m afraid to say, was a bit overpowering for my taste, though that may be a fault of my water rather than the tea.

It was, as I recall £16 when I looked it up, which is good value, including next day delivery. At the moment they have a Christmas themed selection which doesn’t strike me as such great value.

If you are looking for a hamper you could try Mrs Botham. Botham’s of Whitby offer great food, excellent pork pies, and a reasonably-priced selection, plus they treat apostrophes with proper respect.

Bettys Box Lid

These are the Scones

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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.

Pictures of Happier Times

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I couldn’t find the photos I was looking for, so I hope these make a suitable substitute.

Captain Cook’s Plinth

Microlight at Sandsend

Whale Jaw – Whitby

Captain Cook – Whitby

This group is from the Whitby area, in the days when we used to get into the car and drive where we liked. With hindsight, we should probably have done less driving, both from the viewpoint of pollution and cost. We will be making some changes once the lockdown finishes.

Daffodils

Grape Hyacinths

Daffodils

Forsythia

Spring flowers are always good – I am missing them at the moment as we live in an urban area and the local front gardens are a bit of a wasteland. We will be looking at the front garden with a view to making it more of a spring garden – at the moment it is great for butterflies and pollinators but it is only just about to start. We should look at starting the flowering earlier. We have said this before but always put it off on the grounds we have plenty of time. As current events show, this isn’t actually true.

Scones – John Lewis

Scones – Thoresby

Scones – Peterborough

Apart from driving where we liked, we could also have as much food as we liked. The fragility of our supply chain has been an eye-opener over the last month, as has the behaviour of panic-buyers. It has been very dispiriting to see pictures of bins of discarded food at a time when some people are struggling to get any at all.

After holding back and buying only what we needed, we spent a nervy couple of weeks worrying about supplies. If it ever happens again I’m not sure what I’d do, because our political masters and supermarket CEOs were wide of the mark when they talked of “plenty” of food being available and “robust” supply chains. I haven’t been able to buy flour or even a bread kit for the last month. We even had two weeks when we couldn’t buy courgettes or potatoes.

Robin

Sheep in Derbyshire

Robin in a Garden Centre Cafe

Finally, a few Robins and a sheep – something to look forward to as things return to something that resembles normality. I’m not sure they will ever be quite as they were because I sense we are all a little more afraid of what the future may hold for us.

It’s tempting to get philosophical and political here, but instead I’ll end with a feelgood story.

Scone Chronicles 37 – This One Has Scones!

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Don’t get excited. I said it has scones. I didn’t say they were good scones. I’ll get that bit over with quickly, they weren’t good scones.

Julia went to order the Sausage Pie and, due to a mix up in communication, came back with scones. It’s too boring to explain fully, but after thirty years she hasn’t mastered the art of listening and I have developed a habit of nodding and going “Yes dear.”

She merged two conversations we had had in the car, one about scones and one about lunch. As she walked away from the table she said something I didn’t catch and I nodded and said “Yes”.

And that was how we ended up with Sausage Pie and Scones for lunch. You only needed to look at the scones to see that the odds were heavily stacked in favour of dyspepsia. To be fair, they were the best looking things in the sweet section. The lemon meringue pie positively radiated bright yellow malevolence and I have already forgotten the other choices – they were neither good enough, or bad enough, to remember.

The scones were large, slightly lopsided, dotted with burnt currants and dusted with sugar. When I was able to inspect them more closely I discovered they were crusty, dry and in possession of a lot of stiff, industrial cream.

Scones at Carsington Water

I don’t mind large, lopsided and even the burnt currants. They are all faults I’m familiar with. On the other hand, dusting scones with icing sugar should be punished severely. It’s not necessary and it’s not adding to the taste or the experience. I don’t like crusty scones or dry scone and I think less is more in terms of cream. If I want blocked arteries I’ll ask for them, but all I really want is a garnish of cream, enough to add flavour and texture, not an inch thick dollop of chemically treated grease.

Am I being unfair? Probably, but a baker of bad scones deserves criticism. They weren’t necessarily bad just because the were home made – faulty and home made go together to a certain extent, and we all make mistakes. I have made many faulty scones in my time. It was the choices that annoyed me – the decision to sprinkle with sugar, to bake too fiercely and to use masses of badly maltreated cream.

I would have shown more faults but I couldn’t take all the photos I would have liked because I was being stared at by a woman on a neighbouring table. I’m still a bit self-concious about photographing my food, and didn’t like to carry on whilst being glared at from a distance of four feet. She was a touch on the small, round side, and it was like being singled out by an evilly-intentioned teddy bear .

Scone Chronicles 33 – Yes, we have Scones

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I had meant to space the food reviews out a bit more, but I’ve been forced into this by a certain amount of heckling about the lack of scones.

Move smoothly on from Sunday evening, ignore the next couple of days and that brings us neatly to Wednesday and time for elevenses. We are at the Peak Shopping Village, the ducks are clustering round looking for food, and a small scone shaped gap is opening up in my middle regions.

We went to buy half-price boots for Julia, as her expensive ones had started letting in water. This was easy – by the time she had made her selection I had made a circuit of The Works, failed to buy a book, and had left in disgust. We then went to the hospice charity shop where the only thing I wanted turned out to be part of the display. I hate it when that happens.

By that time I was definitely in e of refreshment so we entered Massarella’s cafe and while I sought a table Julia went to get tea and scones.

A mediocre scone, with badly applied egg wash

As we breakfasted late (porridge followed by sausage sandwiches, using the sausages left over from the night before), other people were already lunching. My quest for a clean table did not go well and left me elbow to elbow with a stocky elderly lady (I select my words carefully) chasing the final clean table. She had a fine set of elbows and a surprising turn of speed, and laid her walking stick across the table to claim the prize as I floundered in her wake.

Massarella’s always sounds like an Italian restaurant, with tiled floors and lots of chatter. Add the barking of a dog to that and the whole ambiance falls apart, and not just for me. Several other people were clearly irritated by the dog-friendly aspect of the cafe.

However, compared to the scones, the barking dog was no problem. The scones were dry inside, and lacked flavour. My mother used to mutter “cheap baking” at times like this. It certainly seemed to lack the rich, fluffy, buttery sensation you get from a decent scone.

OK, not as disappointing as England’s woeful rugby performance, but still pretty disappointing

I have a feeling they may have been frozen, and dried out in thawing.

We will go back because we like the atmosphere, and the Italian gent behind the counter charmed Julia. And, of course, because they offer Afternoon Tea at £18 for two people. But, like a trip to the hospice shop, we won’t expect too much.

That last comment could also apply to the charity shops of Bakewell where we visited later – they don’t seem to have much in, and it’s getting harder to justify the time spent looking round when there are no decent books.

So, Massarella’s, the Charity shops of Derbyshire and The Works (where I failed to buy a single book) had all better pull their socks up. This is just not good enough!

Because they have ducks, a nature trail and a carved owl archway, I will visit again, but they would be well-advised to get a grip. Carved owls cannot replace decent scones.

Peak Shopping Village

The Scone Chronicles XXII – Afternoon Tea

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Sorry, I had intended managing one instalment of the Scone Chronicles a week, but we haven’t been out much this year and when we do go out it tends to be repetitive. Added to that, I don’t always take photos, I don’t want to admit to all the rubbish I eat and I’m not always very efficient.

This post has been maturing like a fine wine, for over a week. This probably tells you something about my definition of “fine wine”. That, in turn, reminds me of the wine kits they used to sell in Boots chemists thirty years ago. No, forty years ago…

How time flies.

However, I will return to the subject of scones rather than drift off on a digression relating to cheap wine.

Julia’s brother and sister-in-law have been up to visit and invited us to Afternoon Tea at the St James Hotel in Nottingham.

The review is a bit tricky because I don’t want to criticise a meal I’ve been treated to. Fortunately, after we’d left, the in-laws said it wasn’t a patch on their local tearoom and was more on a par with the local Patisserie Valerie. That’s not meant to be a slur on Patisserie Valerie, because they are a chain and a chain does things differently to somewhere claiming to be a boutique hotel. Or it should do.

It is, considering the deal they do, a very good value budget Afternoon Tea – if their website is correct, afternoon tea for two costs slightly less than afternoon tea for one at Bettys. If you don’t get the discount, it’s still a lot cheaper. However, don’t be fooled by the picture on the website, the sandwich fillings were much less generous in real life and the cake selection was not as good.

In fact, the sandwich fillings could accurately be described as meagre, the cakes and scones all seemed to be mass produced and they really should have been quicker on bringing the tea.

However, they surroundings are pleasant, and not as crowded as Bettys at Harlow Carr. The company was, as you would expect, excellent, and the neighbours were sufficiently far away as to be part of the background chatter, again, unlike Bettys.

So – comparisons.

Scones with jam and cream

Cakes at Bettys were far better. Sandwich fillings at Bettys were better. Scones at Bettys were better (and not dusted with icing sugar – I hate it when they do that).

However, sandwiches at St James’s were fresher, surroundings were more relaxing and the cost was more affordable.

At St James we got one pot of clotted cream between two of us – it’s enough, but it’s the only place I’ve ever been that does that. Don’t know whether I’m happy not to clot my arteries or unhappy at being short-changed.

I’m not sure which was better value, as they both had their good points, and both had their less good points. Nor am I sure if either is worth repeating.

I suppose I’ll just have to keep eating until I find a better place.

(Sorry about the quality of the photography – low lighting).

The Scone Chronicles XX

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I’ve decided to stick with Roman Numbers for the time being – it seems rather lightweight to use the word Chronicles then use ordinary numbers. With snowflakes, Millennials and all the rest of that stuff, we don’t need more lightweights. We need austerity, Spartan living conditions and more of those rough grey blankets we used to use as bedding when I was a lad.

Duvets, I suspect, have a lot to answer for in the softening of the species.

We couldn’t add to the chronicles at Bempton, because there wasn’t room. It was quite crowded and, despite the rain, even the outside tables were all taken. There was room at some, but people seemed to be indicating a preference for solitude by the way they were spreading their kit about.

The only table with nobody on it was one that was ringed with tripods and telescopes, indicating that someone would be back to use it. Or that tripods are becoming sentient and demanding food.

I’ve probably been reading too much Terry Pratchett…

You’d have thought they might have made provision for a seasonal rush.

We had, as you can see from the photograph, prawn sandwiches from Tesco, whilst sitting in the car on the seafront at Scarborough. That tiny stump in the distance is Scarborough Castle. It’s more impressive in real life, and it has a colony of Kittiwakes nesting on the cliffs below.

One the way home we had chips at Filey. They are excellent chips and the fish is probably the freshest I’ve had from a chip shop.

You do, however, pay a premium for this. At £6.50 a portion it’s nearly as expensive as sitting down in some places. That is the dilemma – eat excellent fish and chips in the car whilst watching the sea, or, for almost the same price, have peas and tea, and sit at a plastic table that exudes an aura of stickiness whilst moaning about the poor quality fish.

Decisions, decisions…

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Life after the Care Farm