We don't have enough teaspoons.
    You know what I mean, the dinner table type, the kind with which you stir your hot beverage. We always go through our entire ration everyday. On days when I'm baking or laboring a bit more intensely than usual over the stove, we simply don't have enough. I use teaspoons for measuring "little bits of things", as I did the mace in the Cherry Almond Scone recipe I just baked. When I'm making things like tuna fish, deviled eggs, lots of times when I'm cooking a dinner entre, I use, say, "two heaping teaspoons (of the dinner table variety) mayonnaise", or "three heaping teaspoons dill pickle relish, the extra brine of which should be sopped up on a paper towel or another convenience or your tuna mixture will be too salty".
    Today, for the scones, although I couldn't fit either spoon into the spice jar, I could get more of the dinner table teaspoon in the jar, thus, I was able to get 'exactly' the amount of mace I thought I'd need, a heaping three quarters of a conventional cooking teaspoon. As well, I was daydreaming about how the scones would taste with teaspoons-of-the-dinner-table-variety-full of lemon curd. The reverie was disturbed by the realization that if I wanted to have enough teaspoons left for Mom's inevitable evening coffees, we should use a knife with the curd.
    Today is definitely a cooking/baking day. It's also a soupy day. We'll probably polish off the latest of my HoneyBaked Ham and bean soup today, with scones, again, after having them for breakfast. The scones are out of the oven. They've already odorized the air and opened Mom's eyes. I checked on her just a few minutes ago...she's not interested in arising yet. I'll let her go as late as 1500 today, if she wants, and lay easy on the stats. That should ease her through what I imagine she's expecting to be a low-down day. It's already rained; she knows this. It's the rain that's keeping her in bed, even though the scones smell delicious, wrapped in the baking towels, sitting on the cooling rack on the oven. They are probably, right now, at the peak of their ripe-eating heat.
    Oh, yes. The recipe. It's a modification of a Joy of Cooking recipe, to which I was going to link you for comparison but the official site doesn't have this recipe. I plugged the recipe name, Classic Current Scones, into Google and, in fact, the recipe is known out there but mainly as a basis for modifications. Apparently it is a classic recipe. Well, here's my take on it:*  *  *  *  *Cherry Almond Scones Recipe

Dry Ingredients:
1½ cups High Altitude Hungarian Unbleached Flour
½ cup High Altitude Hungarian Whole Wheat Flour

I always try to get a little whole wheat flour in, if I can. Rye and graham flours make superb shake-it-and-brown-it flours and, late, the residue makes up into a rich gravy. I usually use the seasoned drenching flour for making gravy later.

⅓ cup white granulated sugar
2¼ tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt

Other Dry Ingredients:
½ cup dried tart cherries
½ cup Mariani dried cherries
¾ cup freshly toasted (in a medium skillet, tossing and shoving them around a lot until you begin to smell them and they begin to brown; maybe about 5 minutes) sliced almonds
¾ tsp rounded tsp mace

Dry Ingredients Preparation:
    Whisk together Dry Ingredients and mace. Drop in and dredge fruit and nuts.

Wet Ingredients:
6 tbl cold, unsalted butter, cut into chunks
1 jumbo egg
½ cup heavy cream
¾ generous tsp almond flavoring

Inclusion Preparation:
    Cut butter chunks into dry ingredients/fruit/nut mixture until the flour part is partly the size of peas and partly the size of bread crumbs.
    Add egg, cream and flavoring. Mix together with spatula until all ingredients are moistened and hold together in the bowl. Knead in the bowl a little to cohere all ingredients and create a lump of moist dough.
    Separate dough into two equal parts. Roll each part into a circle then flatten on a lightly floured surface to a height of about ¾" and a diameter of about 6". Do the same to the other piece of dough. Slice through the dough circle with a butter knife, creating parts of the circle, so that when the scones are baked they'll present themselves in perfect little pieces.
    Before baking, I followed the suggestion to brush the tops with heavy cream and lightly sprinkle granulated sugar over the unbaked scones. I've never done that, before. Should be interesting.
    Place dough circles on ungreased cookie sheet.
    Bake in preheated 425° oven for 12-15 minutes until raised and golden brown.
    They baked for 15 minutes. If I'd left them in any longer they'd begin to show burn. In part because I wasn't sure I used enough baking powder (they didn't seem to rise enough" and in part because I may have detected a little bit of unbaked dough ooze in the serrations, I immediately wrapped the scones in baking towels and placed them on a cooling rack on the stove above the cooling oven.
*  *  *  *  *    We haven't yet tried the scones. In fact, it's getting pretty close to 1500, I'd probably better awaken her, get the bacon started, and tempt her to breakfast with the promise of warm Cherry Almond Scones.
    With or without lemon curd.
    I'll report back on how they turned out...
    ...later.
    The following posted at 1826: Well, they tasted very good but were a little dry. They were fully baked but didn't rise enough and I'm sure the reason is not enough liquid. This is one of the primary problems of baking at high altitudes. Flour, out of the bag, is quite a bit dryer in higher altitudes, which is one of the reasons I use high altitude flour, which sometimes helps and sometimes doesn't. I was rather sure there was enough humidity in the air and had been for long enough that I wouldn't need much extra liquid...so, I confined extra liquid to the almond flavoring. I probably should have used two extra large eggs rather than one jumbo egg. They turned out good, though. My mother didn't notice the dryness because of all the butter she put on hers. She liked them well enough, too.
    Their flavor, by the way, is mild almond. I prefer a stronger almond flavor but my mother actually doesn't like almond flavoring, at all, unless it's just from the nuts, so my comprise worked well. The mace wasn't detectable except for a heightened fruity flavor to the bread part.
    I'll be making these again, soon, with a different, really exotic spice; probably in the next few days, as I'll be receiving the spice tomorrow. At that time I'll increase the liquid. I'm sure it's the liquid. It couldn't be the baking powder, which was fine a couple of weeks ago when I made the spice cake. Baking powder doesn't go that bad overnight!

Labels: high altitude flour, teaspoons

- posted by Gail Rae @ 13:55  0 comments   email...this post