Still Stuck on Scones

I'm not working today, and as I often do on my day off, I have plans to meet Tom in Bethesda for lunch. Whenever I meet Tom at his office, I try to bring some baked goods for him to share. Fortunately, he works at a small office, so this doesn't require too much effort. Since Tom raved about the Cheddar Chive Scones I made last weekend -- and because I still had a bunch of chives and a block of aged cheddar left over from that effort -- I decided to bake another batch of savory scones.

I have been asked in the past about how to form scones into the familiar triangle shape, and what do I think about the now widely-available scone pans by Nordic Ware that shape the dough into perfect wedges for you. I think that a special pan for making scones is completely unnecessary, because it is so easy to form beautiful scones by hand. In short, you form the dough into a ball, flatten it into a disk, and then cut the disk into 6 (or if it's large, possibly 8) wedges. Voila! Nice triangle-shaped scones!


There is also something wonderfully elegant about making scones this way. It requires minimum handling of the dough, creates no waste, and results in uniformly-sized scones. Some recipes call for the use of a cookie cutter, which means that you have to reassemble and rework dough scraps, something that can make the dough tougher.

The pale and scrawny looking triangles rise in the oven to beautiful rounded wedges, an appearance I think is more attractive than the straight-sided clones you would get with a scone pan. So maybe they're not all identical. But I think there is something wonderful about the individual beauty of homemade.