OmNomNom!

Awhile ago, winkingstar held a tea party and had a [food/recipe discussion thread]. I contributed [hints for adding fruit to scones] and have reposted it below (with very slight edits in an attempt for greater coherency). It's worth checking out the entire food thread as there's other recipes there too! Including some for scones themselves. :P


After having added the wet ingredients to the dried, and just before they're finished being mixed: pat out the dough and lay down the fruit either over all of the surface or just over half. Then you'll cover up the fruit with the dough (if you had spread it over all the surface, roll it up like a jelly roll; if you had spread it over half, fold the uncovered half over the covered half). Then finish working the dough (there really should be very minimal working left to do), pat it out, and form the scones. This will result in the dough getting much less coloured by the juices and have fewer burst berries. (If, however, you'd rather have the berry juices colour the scone as a whole, add the berries with the wet ingredients-- and if working with frozen berries or if you otherwise have a bit of juice available, you can substitute some juice for a little bit of the liquid. Note that if you thaw the frozen berries, it's almost certain that you'll end up staining a bit of the dough, no matter the rest of the care you take, just because thawed berries are so very messy.) (For dried fruit, just toss them until coated in a bit of the dried ingredients before adding them to the dried ingredients, and they won't stick together hardly at all.) Generally I find that the smaller the fruit pieces, the easier it is to work with. But also I really like blackberry scones, so clearly sometimes compromises must be made! :) Also, whenever I've worked with frozen fruit in scones I've always kept them as frozen as possible, right up until they got slipped into the oven-- in order to keep the juices from staining everything and in order to avoid damaging the fruit further.

(crossposted to my journal)