Scones

One of my favorite cookbooks is the Family Fun Cookbook formerly known as the Disney Family Cookbook. It's got tons of pictures, easy recipes and little tips like learning math with cereal and how to bake a dinosaur cake. It's like How to Cook Everything, except Ann-friendly and with color photos. I especially like the pictures of children enjoying cooking and baking They're always so cheerful wearing their too big aprons and comically floppy chef's hats. They're very clean looking kids with the exception of an adorable and strategically placed poof of flour in their hair and on their faces when they're baking. I think the little Asian girl enjoying a bowl of sesame noodles is especially cute.

The Best Ever Banana Bread recipe and the Fruit Filled Scones recipe are very yummy and very simple to make. The banana bread recipe requires five ripe bananas, which limits the frequency I make it because I can never seem to gather five ripe bananas. I have to plan ahead and be deliberate if I want five bananas for baking, but the banana bread is super moist and delicious because the almost obscene amount of bananas in it. I make the scones more frequently. Adam really likes them and often requests scones with golden raisins. (Unfortunately some of my coworkers detest golden raisins likening their physical appearance to "boogers.") Yesterday I made a batch with golden raisins and one with dried cranberries and pecans. Sometimes I add some fun chocolate chips. Here's the recipe for your enjoyment.

Scones

2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter (1 stick) cut into a few smaller pieces
2/3-3/4 cup milk
3/4-1 cup add ins (dried fruit, nuts, chocolate chips, etc)

Mix together flour, sugar, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt in a bowl. Combine butter and flour mixture and blend by hand or with a mixer until mixture has a course crumbly texture. Mix in milk until mixture becomes doughy and holds together. Mix in the add ins. Just divide dough into even mounds onto a baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees F until tops start to turn light brown.

The instructions say to pat the dough out and cut it into smaller triangles, but I don't follow these directions because the dough is too sticky and it's too much of a project. I use my large cookie scoop and scoop out the dough onto a baking sheet. My scones look more like scoops of ice cream than actual triangular scones. However they taste yummy so I can justify taking the easy way out.