Purely Random

Whole Wheat Raisin-Walnut Scones

(makes one 8-inch round of scones to be cut into as many wedges as desired)

• 3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/4 cup sugar (I used turbinado—because I had some)
• 1 1/4 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 4 oz cream cheese, cold (I used reduced fat)
• 1/4 cup butter, cold
• 3/4 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped
• 1 large egg
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1.5 tsp. vanilla

There are two critical components to the scone-making procedure: 1) preheat your oven well in advance to make sure it’s up to heat, and 2) don’t over-mix the ingredients. Just before you shape the dough, you’ll have a crumbly mess and probably have a strong desire to add more liquid and mix until it looks more like dough. Don’t do it. Excessive mixing helps the flour develop long gluten strands—a necessity for bread but a big no-no for pastries. Just keep those two points in mind while you follow the steps below, and you too will be able to enjoy a delicious batch of home-baked scones.

1. Preheat oven to 450° F.

This will help ensure that your oven is sufficiently pre-heated. I would actually recommend doing this 15 minutes before you even start mixing. Your goal is for the oven to have been on for no less than 30 minutes when you slide your scones in. If you do wait around for a little while, put your butter, cream cheese and the bowl for your dry ingredients in the freezer while you wait—this will make it easier to cut in your flour when the time comes.

2. Combine dry ingredients.

Mix the flours, sugar, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl to combine. You’re just giving them a quick stir with a whisk or fork to get them evenly distributed.

3. Cut in the butter and cream cheese.

This is the only step of the process that may seem foreign if you’re not used to baking pastries—but it’s fairly fool-proof. The idea is to make sure your butter and cream cheese are cold, then use a pastry blender to mash it into the flour. If you don’t have a pastry blender, you can use your hands, a fork, or a couple of butter knives to help you break it up. As you work, the chunks of butter and cream cheese will be worked into little balls coated with flour. You want to keep working until the balls are quite small—I’ve heard people call the target consistency, “like that of cornmeal,” but I think it’s a little bit more coarse than that. Just work quickly to avoid heating and melting your chilled fats.

4. Mix in the nuts and raisins.

The original recipe called for apricots but I used raisins and walnuts. You can use anything you like for this step or even nothing it all. Just don’t go too much over 1.5 cups of total extras.

5. In a separate container, beat wet ingredients.

Beat together the egg, milk, and vanilla in a separate container (a small measuring cup will probably do just fine here).

6. Mix wet ingredients into the dry.

This is where things get a little tricky. You may have just a little too much of the wet ingredients (due to some minor mods that I made to the original recipe—and my inability to throw away half an egg).

Pour almost all of the wet mixture into the blended flour/butter/cream cheese mixture. Nothing would go horribly wrong if you used all of it, but I’m being cautious in my directions. Gently mix the wet and dry ingredients with your hands to form a very rough dough. If you find yourself mixing for more than 30 seconds, you’re probably over-doing it. Like I said up top, the target result looks more like a crumbly mess than dough; deal with it.

7. Dump onto parchment paper or a non-stick baking pad.

There will still be some dry crumbs floating around, but you should be able to push the dough into a cohesive mound. Flatten slightly and fold the mound over onto itself a few times, and the mixture should become much less crumbly.

At this point, I’m going to make a shameless plug for Silpat baking sheets. That’s what I like to pour my dough onto for shaping. It’s nothing more than a silicone baking sheet with glass fibres inside to give it some rigidity. Because it’s silicone, and hence, non-stick, you don’t need to worry about adding any extra flour. Plus, you can just put the Silpat right into the oven with your shaped dough on top. Of course, you could also just use parchment paper, but I do enough baking that Silpat is both easier and more economical in the long run.

8. Shape into an 8-inch disc.

Shape the dough into a round disk about 8 inches in diameter and an inch high. You should be able to just push it into place with your hands—no rolling pin required.

9. Cut into wedges

I cut mine into about 8 wedges using a big butcher’s knife. You can vary that number slightly to suit your needs, but I wouldn’t go too much smaller than an 8-way cut. As you cut, it makes sense to pull the wedges out just a little so they have room to rise and there’s room for hot air to circulate between them in the oven.

10. Bake at 450° F for 10-12 minutes.

Slide the assembled scones and their Silpat or parchment paper onto a cookie sheet for transfer, and move them into your oven. I like to skip the cookie sheet and use a pizza peel to slip the silpat right onto a pizza stone. Leaving them on a cookie sheet is probably just as well and a little easier.

11. Remove and let cool for 10-15 minutes.

Don’t let them cool too long. There’s nothing quite like warm, delicious, and kind of chewy scones coming right out of your oven. I recommend having some friends over so you can give them a chance to enjoy the goods (and also prevent yourself from munching on them for the rest of the day).