Scones have come a long way from their origin as humble oatcakes baked at the hearth on an iron griddle. A clue to their long ancestry is the buttermilk and baking soda still used as their leavening – dating from the days before modern baking powder. Oatmeal scones are still the most traditional version of these small quick breads, but fancier (and much sweeter) varieties have proliferated on bakery shelves.
Tom and I don’t care for breakfast cereals, so my pantry doesn’t provide oatmeal for a spur-of-the-moment decision to make scones for breakfast. I do have a favorite scone recipe, however, and I’ve found a way to get them to the table even more quickly of a morning.
My recipe comes from Baking with Julia, a handsome volume based on Child’s Master Chef television series, with recipes from many well-known bakers. Its buttermilk scone recipe is attributed to Marion Cunningham. I’m being particular about the source because this exact recipe, word for word, can be found in quite a few places on the Internet, with no credit given to the book. I was astonished to see such blatant plagiarism! You can read an honest posting of the recipe here.
I vary the recipe from time to time, using honey for sugar, yogurt for buttermilk; kneading in some raisins, chopped apricots, or blueberries; and always cutting back on the melted butter and sugar topping, which is too much sweetness for me. This week for the first time I decided to try two new things: making the dough partially the day before, and shaping it into the recipe’s option for rolled scones with a jam filling, rather than plain triangular ones. I had some excellent Maine wild blueberry jam that I thought would be very nice in them.
But I’d never seen a rolled scone before, and I wasn’t sure I was reading the shaping instructions correctly. So, also the day before, I’d googled “rolled scones” for images (which is how I happened upon the plagiarizations of the recipe). What I saw were round buns, each with a pinwheel pattern made by several spirals of jam within the dough. OK, we can try that.
The advance steps went fine. I put together the dry ingredients, cut in the cold butter, and put the whole bowl in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, I stirred in the buttermilk and kneaded the dough briefly. Then it was time for the rolling.
Here’s where things went iffy. The recipe said to roll each half of the dough into a strip 12 inches long and ½ inch thick. Parenthetically, it concedes that the strip won’t be very wide. I’ll say it wasn’t – mine barely reached 4 inches. Then it said to spread on 2 tablespoons of jam, leaving a narrow border bare on one of the long sides, roll it up like a jelly roll, and slice it. Well, since my jam was more like a preserve, containing many tiny whole wild blueberries, it couldn’t be just painted smoothly onto the dough. It made a lumpy line of filling.
It was a struggle to wrap the dough around those berries far enough to enclose the filling at all, with no hope of rolling it up far enough to make a spiral pattern. It sliced more cleanly than I’d feared it might, but the slices came out lopsidedly circular, with a single puddle of jam in the center.
I suspected those jam puddles would ooze out all over the pan the moment it hit the oven. But they didn’t. The scones weren’t exactly neat looking when baked, and they were quite small: Each half of the recipe, which would have made 6 triangular scones, made 12 rolled ones. But they tasted perfectly good. No problem: just eat two instead of one. Two are already gone from this next picture – Tom and I couldn’t wait to sample them.
I must admit that, interesting as the rolled scones were for an experiment, the effect on the palate was really no different than if you’d just spread jam on a baked plain scone, which are a lot quicker and easier to make. I know this because, fearing that I might mess up the rolled ones, I used only one half of the recipe for them. Here are the six plain scones I made from the other half, modestly awaiting their own acquaintance with the wild blueberry jam.












































