exploring scones

I'm fascinated with the concept of scones.  Maybe it's my ancestry from the British Isles.  Mom’s mother was mostly Scotch-Irish, my mother's dad was of Welsh origin.  My dad is of English origin. 

I have watched a boatload of you-tube videos and read at least a cookbook's worth of recipes.  I have read that making good scones can be difficult.  Hubby says his ex-bride made ones that would break teeth and the ones he has had elsewhere weren't much better.  As I was watching the you-tube videos, scone making looks to me to be about the same process as biscuit making.  And we all know that with biscuits if you aren't careful you can end up with hardtack!

I watched a you-tube video of a unique process that really intrigued me put out by the American Test Kitchen.  Then I searched for the recipe and direction; finding it here about half-way down on the page.  Here's what I did to their recipe.

ATK Blueberry Scones

8 TBSP unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda (Ha! I used too much! Didn't affect the taste though.)
I forgot the salt! It calls for a 1/2 tsp.
1/2 tsp. of lemon extract. (The recipe calls for lemon zest, I didn't have any lemons.)
2 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup of whole milk (I used 2% cause that's what I have.)
1/2 cup sour cream
1 1/2 cups of frozen blueberries

I set the oven to preheat at 425 degrees.  I thought I would be slick, pull a stick of butter out of the fridge and use my food processor to grate the butter.  LOL, what a mess!  Freeze the butter!

Time to punt!  I decided to cream the butter and sugar together in the food processor.

Okay, that doesn't look too bad!  Then, I added the baking powder, baking soda and lemon extract giving it a whiz.  Scraped everything down; added the flour and gave it another whiz until I had bread crumb consistency.

Hey, I may be able to salvage this!  Next, I added the milk and sour cream and whizzed it until it just barely came together.  I then scarped a very sticky dough onto a heavily floured piece of parchment paper.

At this point, I should have stuck the whole sticky mess into the freezer and firmed up the dough but I didn't.  I tried to work the dough like she did in the video.  I finally put the dough in the freezer.  I went to switch the laundry over and came back.

I retrieved the dough from the freezer and proceeded to press the dough out to a 12-inch square. I sprinkled the frozen blueberries on, while lightly pressing the blueberries into the dough.  Then I scraped and folded the dough in thirds.  I patted the dough out to about 4 maybe 5 inches wide.  I cut the dough into quarters and then again into triangles to make 8 servings.  I moved the wedges to my parchment lined baking pan and baked them for 18 minutes in the 425-degree oven.

A few things I didn't do!  I didn't brush the tops with melted butter and sprinkle sugar across the tops.  They would have looked nicer if I had at least brushed the excess flour off the tops.  Next time I will add the salt to see if it is really needed.  I thought they tasted pretty darn good without it.

The scones had a light lemon under-tone with a great blueberry taste.  The scones also rose/raised??? very well and were very light.  They were not crumbly at all.  And best of all, Hubby and Sister Suzy liked them!  We even discussed what different fruits we thought would taste good in this recipe.  I'm thinking frozen cherries next! 

I think next time when I get to the bread crumb stage I will turn the flour mixture into a bowl and incorporate the liquids in the bowl to cut down on the mess in the food processor.  It would make chilling the dough easier before working it into its final shape.  The other thing I think I'm going to do is add an extra 1/4 cup of flour instead of trying to handle such a sticky mess on a floured surface.  Something else I would do is divide the dough into 10 maybe 12 servings instead of the 8 as I thought they were almost to big; if you can believe that!

Stay tuned!  I want to try a French Apple Walnut Scone recipe and look at some recipes that have the traditional oats in them.

Have a good day!

Judy

lookee at what I found

An outfit I made for Sister Suzy about 20 years ago!  I took three day off work, at the time, to make her six outfits so she would have plenty of cute clean clothes when she first arrived at the in-laws house.

We were cleaning the shed out of stuff from the in-laws that had migrated to our house and I found the outfit lying in a magazine rack that looked like a cradle.  The mice had a good time chewing out one side of the top.

Sister Suzy had trouble believing she was that little.  She was also fascinated with the size of the shoes.  I had to chuckle when she was flabbergasted about her wearing a dress every day.

I went looking for the pattern in my pattern drawer but didn't find it.  I bet the pattern is in some box rolled up with some fabric waiting for me to get back to it and make another one.  She's a bit too big for the pattern now, LOL, so I will have to wait until somebody has a little girl to use the pattern again.

That's the most blog worthy thing I've done in a while.  Haven't felt like sewing and knitting on my sweater is progressing very slowly.  However the computer card-game hearts is sucking up a bunch of my time when we are not cleaning out storage rooms and sheds.

Have a good day!

Judy

more on life's happenings

So what have I been up to since the last post? 

Knitted some more on my sweater.  I've got most of the body knitted and as usual with stockinette it is all curled up and not very photogenic.

Cooked up and dehydrated some ground beef we found on sale to make backpacker's gravel for camping and such.

Starting to finish our remodel of our travel trailer.  We have one bed frame installed but can't seem to get to the other because life is interfering.

Hubby's mother entered hospice and has passed away.  The dear lady is now without pain for which we are all very thankful.

We decided to trade our diesel pick-up truck in that we tow the trailer with for a gasoline powered one.  That will lower our one-n-only payment.  The good news is the loan isn't for any longer than what was left on the diesel.  A little monetary breathing room would be nice.

We've been kicking around the earth boxes idea.  The cost is way more than we can afford so I've been looking at DIY clones of earth boxes.  I think we will use that guy's idea with the wicking system that I saw in this video.  We are hoping to get some kind of garden this year because it is still very dry here.  So unless we get a lot more rain this spring, things don't look good for crops or forage for animals.  The watershed ponds are still dry.

That's about it except our anniversary rolled around this month.  We went to Emporia, KS and picked up Sister Suzy.  Then, the three of us played in the hot-tub and heated swimming pool for two day at the hotel.

I hope everyone has a good day!

Judy

startitis

My terminal case of startitis has been flaring-up.  I have started three shawls and a sweater.  The shawls need to be frogged and put back in the yarn stash.  The sweater looks like a keeper even though I have restarted it twice.  I have bought the yarn for a matching set of mitts and balaclava for Sister Suzy.  I have the patterns printed and everything in a bag together.  As much snow as we have had in the last week I should have got them done two weeks ago. : >)

I have two quilts I've started and lost the inspiration to finish.  Got two more planned but haven't looked in the fabric stash yet.

I need to knuckle down again and get something finished.  Otherwise, the projects start piling up and my monkey-mind gets to driving me crazier than I already am.

Been cooking and canning up a storm.  The grocery store had all the ingredients for salsa on sale so I went nuts and bought enough to do 24 pints.  Only this time I dehydrated the salsa after I made it and the salsa fits in a 1/2-gallon ice cream container.  The stuff tastes great after re-hydrating which was a concern when I came up with the idea.  Made Hubby two kinds of pickled jalapeños with the leftover peppers.  The recipes say to let the jars set for a couple of weeks before trying so I'm not going to publish the recipes until we have tasted them.  Cabbage was on sale, also, so we picked up two heads.  I want to dehydrate them to make up a soup blend of vegetables to have handy for when I want to make a quick soup.  If it turns out well I may get more cabbage.

My desire to wear clean clothes says I need to start the laundry so back to the salt mines!

Everybody have a good day!

Judy

tossed nine patch quilt

This is the fourth quilt I made for the girls.  It is called tossed nine patch and this you-tube video was the inspiration for it.

Sister Suzy wanted this one for herself.

I cut 5-inch square patches.  I used the dark-purple print in the border for the center blocks.  Then I used random purple squares for the outside corners and random green squares for the four inside blocks of the nine patch.

I had to add a fourth inside border on each end because the center of the quilt wasn't long enough to fill the space for a 48" by 72" quilt.  I cut a small diamond stencil that fit on-point and using my washable quilt pencil drew around the stencil for the quilting of that border.   As you can see I used stitch-in-the-ditch for most of the quilt and put a big X in all the larger blocks to make sure the batting didn't shift or bunch in those squares.

One of the things I did differently for this quilt was useing up a bunch of scrap batting that was the same weight or loft.  By spraying the backing well with the spray adhesive it was easy to butt the pieces of batting up against each other and get complete coverage without any shifting or bunching.  The quilt will have to be washed several times to see if I have enough quilting to hold some of the smaller pieces in place. I plan to try it again with another quilt with higher loft scraps.

I decided to go with big squares for the backing on this one.

And here is the label so it can go to it's new home with Sister Suzy.

As a Side note:  I was off-line for about a week as Hubby rebuilt my computer and him trying to get all the bugs worked out.  He ended up having to replace the new motherboard he installed because Windows 7 would not recognize the video card on that board.  The computer is still choking every once in a while so he has some more fine tuning to do.  So my access may still be spotty for a while.

I hope everybody is having a good day!

Judy

Xs and Os quilt

This is the third quilt I made for the girls.

The pattern is called Xs and Os.  The inspiration for the quilt came from a You Tube video by the Missouri Star Quilt Co.  I didn't want to make too deep of borders so I used four and a half blocks across the width of the quilt and alternated the placement of the half-block on each row. Which really made the Xs and Os stand out.  I discovered that after I had the quilt laid out so the light and dark blocks are bunched in areas. (You know, one of those, I wonder what this would look like ideas?)

Figuring out how I was going to pull off the way I wanted the quilting to look was a bit of a challenge.

I had to over-quilt some of my stitching in the ditch to have continuous lines of quilting instead of stopping and starting a lot. I originally planned for the dark red to be the outside border and binding but after measuring and some calculations I discovered I didn't have enough fabric so I reversed my layout of the border.

For the back I decided I wanted to do strips of fabric.

I didn't take a close-up of the label but it's there in the lower right-hand corner!  LOL!

Have a good day!

Judy

appi slopes helix hat

Sister Suzy's hat to match her Helix Mitts.

I had her look at several hat patterns and this is the one she liked the best. It is Appi Slopes by Melissa Mall.  I found it on Ravelry. 

If I knit it again I will make the crown shallower by about two inches. (Start the decreases for the top sooner.)

Making the bill was interesting. The direction say to cut the bill from plastic and wrap in duct tape.  So I cut the bill from an old plastic binder and wrapped it in red duct tape.

I used red for the bill and duct tape because I was worried that the bill would show through the knitting. 

Everyone have a good day!

Judy