Archive for the ‘Scones’ Category
Samoas are one of the most popular Girl Scout cookies for good reason: they have a fantastic combination of flavors. The cookies consist of a butter cookie base that is topped with a rich coating of caramel and coconut and drenched with chocolate. The Girl Scout cookie version – also known as Caramel de Lites – is good, but homemade might be even better because you can have them when you get a craving for Girl Scout cookies and they’re out of season and if you simply prefer homemade goodies to store-bought.
The other good thing about making your own homemade Girl Scout cookies is that it opens the door to use those same flavors in other treats, like a Thin Mint Cheesecake, Samoas Cheesecake Bars, Homemade Samoas Ice Cream or even a batch of Samoas Scones. These scones are my way of infusing the tastiness of Samoas into breakfast without admitting that sometimes I want a cookie with my coffee in the very early morning.
The scones are fairly plain on their own, slightly sweet and with a nice buttery flavor. They are topped with a combination of caramel and coconut, then dipped in and drizzled with semisweet chocolate. For my homemade Samoas cookies, I usually use a fairly firm caramel candy, but I recommend either using homemade caramel sauce or an ice cream topping-type of caramel because you want the scones to still be easy to bite into without the caramel on top getting too hard (better too gooey with these than too firm!). Prepare them about an hour or two before you want to serve them to give the chocolate time to set up, or pop them into the fridge for a couple of minutes before serving if you are cutting it close, timing-wise.
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I have a hard time resisting Rice Krispies Treats. I don’t mean the prepackaged kind that taste rather flat – I mean the simple, homemade kind that are made simply with butter, puffed rice cereal and marshmallows. There is something about those crispy, buttery bars that is almost irresistible – especially when they’re freshly made and still slightly warm – and I can see the appeal of trying to translate it into other dishes. That is exactly what they tried to do at Alice’s Tea Cup when they came up with these Rice Krispies Treats Scones. The scones include mini marshmallows and puffed rice cereal for a cereal treat-like flavor.
The scone dough is a fairly simple recipe and it makes a very tender, fluffy buttermilk scone. The addition of the marshmallows and rice cereal is what transforms these scones. When they’re in the oven, the marshmallows bake up and almost seem to melt into the scones, leaving you with delicious pockets of sweet, toasted marshmallow flavor. The puffed rice cereal bits lend a little bit of crunch and a light cereal flavor, although you don’t get that buttery chewiness that you find in the original cereal treats.
I usually knead my scone dough lightly before cutting the scones out to give them a slightly flaky texture. This dough is not kneaded, so the resulting scones are very tender. The dough is quite sticky (and can be made both in the food processor and by hand) so be sure to flour your work surface before shaping and cutting the dough to prevent it from sticking. The scones are good when they’re at room temperature, but are really best when they are still a bit warm from the oven and you get the butter, marshmallow and cereal flavors that you get in a freshly made batch of cereal treats.
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I really enjoyed the Chocolate Chip Cookie Scones that I made not too long ago, so I was inspired to do another cookie-meets-scone merger starting with an entirely different type of cookie: Oreos (or other similar sandwich cookies). These cookies find their way into all kinds of other desserts, from ice creams to cakes to give them a cookies n’ cream flavor that is so distinctive that it could almost be its own flavor category, like chocolate or vanillla. Needless to say, if there is a cookies n’ cream ice cream, there can certainly be a cookies n’ cream scone!
These scones start out with the dough I usually use as my basic scone recipe. I added a little more sugar than I usually do to highlight the sweetness of the cookies, and I also added in more vanilla to emphasize the vanilla cream filling that the cookies have. I used 1 1/2 cups of crushed oreo-type cookies – I actually used Trader Joe’s Jo-Jos for this batch, so feel free to use other brands of similar cookies – and kneaded them into the dough to distribute the cookies n’ cream bits.
The finished scones turned out great! They were sweet and tender, with a lot of flavor from the chocolate cookies and both the vanilla cream and the vanilla extract. There was no need for butter or jam with these; they are sweet enough to enjoy on their own just as they are, which makes them the perfect scone for snacking on during the afternoon when you want a little pick-me-up or if you want a less obvious dessert than chocolate cake after dinner. Store any leftovers in an airtight container and save them for snacking the next day, too.
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Scones are usually during at breakfast or brunch, and turn up again during afternoon tea. But there is no reason to relegates scones to these two categories when they can make perfectly good dessert treats, as well. To hammer this point home, I gave these scones a dessert twist by mixing in pieces of chocolate chip cookies – kind of like chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, but with already baked pieces of cookie dough!
These scones are made just like any other scones – butter cut into a flour mixture, then kneaded into a dough with some milk and baked until browned – but I have to admit that there was a little more excitement in the air as they baked, because the overall idea just seemed so fun. I wasn’t disappointed when these came out of the oven. They’re light, with a tender-flaky scone texture, and punches of chocolate chip cookie throughout. The cookie pieces add a cookie flavor, but not so much that you forget you’re eating a scone. You can still serve these with whipped cream and fruit, but they’re a nice, not-too-sweet treat on their own.
You can use crisp chocolate chip cookies or chewy chocolate chip cookies in these – whatever you have on hand. Both types will work out well. I used crisp cookies and chopped them into rough pieces. Leaving the pieces a bit bigger will emphasize the chocolate chip cookie aspect of these scones even more, but adding in an extra handful of chocolate chips is an even better way to highlight the cookies and add a little more chocolate.
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Lemon and blueberry is a great combination in baked goods because the two flavors compliment each other very well. The lemon seems to bring out an extra sweetness in the blueberries, which are sweet on their own but don’t have the tart aspect to them that other berries, such as raspberries, can have to set off their flavor. Lemon and blueberry often meet in a batch of muffins or in a quickbread, but they came together for me in a batch of fresh scones this time around.
These Lemon Blueberry Scones are light, tender and have a great overall flavor to them. The scone dough has both fresh lemon juice and fresh lemon zest in it, as well as plenty of blueberries. Although I used fresh lemon, I actually used frozen blueberries for these scones. Fresh will work, but frozen berries hold their shape better when you handle the dough. I always knead my scone dough before cutting it to give it some extra flakiness and frozen berries are much sturdier when it comes down to it. And both fresh and frozen berries taste great. A light lemon glaze drizzled over the top of these before serving is what really makes that lemon flavor pop out and makes the scones even sweeter.
If you’re going to be serving these to company, or to any group, for breakfast, there is an alternative to glazing the scones that makes for a nice presentation. You can double (or triple) the glaze amount and put it in a small bowl with a small spoon or knife, then let guests drizzle on as much as they want while they’re eating. You can also mix a bit of the glaze into some softened butter to make a nice, sweet spread for these scones. They don’t need the butter to make them flavorful, but I’ve never had anyone complain about the opportunity to spread extra butter on a warm, fresh scone.
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