I was in the kitchen all afternoon today. Apart from sitting down for lunch and tea I was standing in the kitchen making salads, today's supper, tomorrow's breakfast, and tomorrow's supper. I'm a bit tired now from standing for hours, but my dark mood that I talked about in my previous post is nearly gone now. For me, cooking, eating, and meditating are the answers for all negative emotions.
Baking, particularly, is very therapeutic. Preparation for evening meals tends to require a lot of chopping and frying. I don't mind that, but baking involves less greasy mess and more fiddling with pastries. Play dough for me, really.
I especially like scone dough. Pasta and bread dough need kneading, which is an energetic workout. Biscuits and shortcrust pastries don't need kneading, but they are quite dry and boring. Scone dough, however, don't need kneading and it's silky and soft just like babies' cheeks. You try. Touching scone dough makes your emotions go soft and silky.
I have recipes for plain scones, blueberry scones, maple syrup scones, cheese scones, and this raisin scones. They are all good, but we tend to like raisin scones split horizontally and eaten warm with butter melting on them. This recipe gives you about 25 mini scones that are soft and moist.
The pronunciation of 'scone', by the way, is 'skon' without the 'o' prolonged :)
Ingredients (for 25 mini scones):
500g plain flour
3 dessertspoon baking powder
3 dessertspoon caster sugar
1 teaspoon salt
300ml full-fat milk
150g raisins
Juice of 1 orange
120g butter, cold and diced into 1cm cubes
1 egg, beaten
Preheat oven to 200C. You will need 5cm biscuit cutter.
Squeeze the orange into a small pan, put all the raisins in, and cook on a low heat until nearly all the juice evaporates and raisins become soft and plump. Leave to cool.
Sift all the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Put the butter into the flour and rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture looks like breadcrumb. Mix the cooled raisins.
Tip all the milk into the bowl and use a large folk to mix everything. When the mixture gets too sticky, start using your hand to make a soft dough. It shouldn't be sticky nor dry.
Plonk the dough on a lightly floured surface and pat it to 3cm thickness. Cut out as many scones as you can from this (about a dozen, I should think), put them all on a baking tray, brush with beaten egg, and bake for 15-20 minutes. While that's happening gather the remainder of the dough and cut out some more. Repeat the process until you used up all the dough.