- Hey, I'm John Kannell and today on Preppy
Kitchen we're making soft, flaky, delicious blueberry scones. So, let's get started. First off, I'm doing an optional step, because I love lemons in everything, especially if blueberries are involved. Into a large bowl, I'm adding a third of a
cup of granulated sugar, that's 66 grams. Now, normally in the recipe you can just add all
the dry ingredients in and then stir some stuff, but because I have lemon zest in here, I'm just going to be using my rasp and we're gonna make my
favorite thing, lemon sugar. Plop that zest in. And yes, a rasp is one of your
best tools in the kitchen, so I hope you have one. I'm just gonna use my clean hands and work that zest into the sugar, this will release a lot of oils and really intensify the lemon flavor. It's optional though, so if you want, you
can just skip this step and add all the dry
ingredients in, like the flour. It smells so good though, it really works a lot
of that lemon flavor out and gives you a wonderful,
like intense, bright flavor. Now that we have that
extravagant lemon flavor worked into our sugar, I'm gonna add two cups
of all purpose flour, That is 240 grams. I hope everyone has a
scale in the kitchen. Do yourself a favor, buy
one, and you'll be so happy, it really cuts down on your dishes, you're not wasting all those
measuring cups and washing them and you get accurate
results every single time, which means your baked
goods are delicious, not dry and bready. Half a teaspoon of
salt, a little contrast. For leavening, we have two
teaspoons of baking powder, in you go. I'm also gonna whisk this together, especially since I had
that sugar on the bottom which is a little heavier. Now it's time for our butter, it's in the fridge though, because it needs to be nice and cold. Unlike most recipes where we want room temperature ingredients, this is more of a pastry situation where you have the cold
butter, the cold cream, everything's cold and it
makes some magic happen when they bake up. Oh, and that's right. My book's available for preorder now, Now, there's a link in
the description box below and there are so many amazing recipes I'm very excited to share with you, including a classic English scone which we'll talk about in a minute. I would categorize this
recipe as an American scone and a lot of my friends in the UK and Australia and
everywhere else are like, "What's going on with this recipe, because you're calling
them scones or scones and this is like a triangle,
so I don't understand". I'm gonna break it down, but we can talk about it in the comments. Here we have things called "biscuits", which are not cookies and
biscuits are like scones, but they don't have eggs. So, a scone looks like a biscuit, if you're watching this from
America, but it has some eggs, it's a little bit richer,
beautiful smooth top, flaky layers and it's
perfect to split open and have lashings of butter, or cream, like a Devonshire cream and jam and everything else. Ah, one of my favorite things to eat. And I used to think that these
triangles that I would see at bakeries here, were all nonsense, because they were like dry,
they were always disappointing, it was weird. I was like, "What's going on? Why can't we just have nice things?". And it turns out that I was wrong. Those were just over baked,
stale, or poorly made. This recipe shows you
how to make a classic American style scone the right way. They're so tender in the middle. They have a wonderful,
flaky character to them and it's just a pleasure to eat. They're also like very
light, they're not dense. And the flavor of the
lemon and the blueberry it's just gonna knock your socks off, these disappear in a flash. And by the way, right now, I'm just cubing my butter
up, using the wrong tool, I don't know why I'm using
this instead of an knife, we stick with our choices. That's half a cup, 113 grams
of cold unsalted butter. If you only have salted butter
on hand, that'll work too, just decrease the amount of
salt by a quarter teaspoon. Now, we're gonna use our clean
hands to work this butter in and we wanna have a play of sizes. So, I wanna have some small
pieces of butter, some larger. That's gonna give us that
flaky, beautiful texture. So, most of the butter will be pea sized, some of it will be a bit smaller, some will be a bit bigger and I'm just breaking these
cubes up with my fingers as I move along. If you want, you could use
a pastry blender too like a, (John clicking his tongue) that tool, or you could
use a food processor, but I will tell you as someone who loves their food processor dearly and used to use it for
pastry all the time, it's difficult to not overmix your butter. So, you wanna have those pieces of butter, they're gonna expand in the oven really like, make magic happen. The food processor just
makes them too small, it's too easy to go, press,
press, press, press, press. And what happens? You get tiny pieces of butter and it looks like it's gonna
work out, but then you eat it, it's like a little bit disappointing. So, just do it by hand. This smells so amazing from
all that lemon and butter, (John laughing)
gosh. And if you don't have blueberries on hand, you can make these with
so many different things. So like, you can use dried cranberries, you could use orange zest
instead of the lemon, you could use candied fruit,
you could leave them plain. Like they're gonna be delicious
in a number of varieties, even chocolate chips. So, you can see, I have
some tiny pea sized pieces, some larger ones that are
like hazelnuts or whatever, you get the idea, there's a play of pieces and as we mix things in, you'll get a little bit
more working in as well. Right now, I'm adding
a cup, or six ounces, of fresh delicious blueberries in. Since my hands are
already coated in flour, I'm just mix these blueberries
in gently, like this. Be gentle with those blueberries, you do not want them to
all burst, right away. And I know fresh blueberries
are not always easy to get. Can you use frozen blueberries? Yes, you can. You can also use other
types of frozen fruit, but stir those in at the very
last moment after the cream, we don't want the juices
to like bleed through and change the consistency of the dough. Our dry mixture's all together, but what'll hold it together? A delicious combination
of cold, heavy cream, three quarters of a cup and one egg, also cold. Crack that right in and
give it a quick whisk. The egg is gonna help hold
things together a bit, that yoke is giving it a
little bit of extra richness, but really, it's like a glue. Now, we're gonna go
back to our dry mixture and pour this creamy deliciousness in. I'm using a silicone spatula, just to move it around as I pour, it'll help the mixing process. And you do not wanna overmix
your dough, if you do that, you're gonna activate
the gluten in the flour and you probably know what'll happen. It'll get kind of dense, it'll get chewy and won't
have that wonderful, like flaky, soft, amazing texture we want. And you can do this with your hands too, but that is very messy. So, I like using a spatula
and just being careful to fold it all together, without really mixing it aggressively. I'm also being gentle with
my blueberries, right now. And you can see this mixture
is super wet, come take a look. I have some pockets of dry,
I wanna get rid of those, so we're just folding everything in. And yes, I'm being very gentle, in part because of my blueberries, I don't want those to get burst. I'm grabbing a baking sheet, little parchment paper for that. And this is a little bit messy right now, so let's grab some flour,
sprinkle it on your counter. I'm gonna turn this out
onto my flowered surface. A scone should look a bit
unmanageable at this point. Get everything off of your spatula. Now, a little bit of flower for your hands and I'm just gonna shape this into a ball. You're definitely not like kneading it, or anything at this point. It's just shaping it into
a ball and then a disc, you can pat it down a bit. Some more flour for
your hands, it's sticky. Keep it moving. And I'm shaping this
into an eight inch disc and you can see there's
blueberries throughout. There's big chunks of butter that are gonna give you
that flaky amazing texture. This is sticky, so in between cuts, I'm gonna dust this in some flour. Cut it into quarters. Now, you have your quarters
and you have eighths. Trying not to crunch too
many blueberries as I cut. So many math lessons in baking. These are gonna go onto
our baking sheet now, just give them some space. But if we put these in the oven now, horrible things would
happen and that'd be bad. Now that these are safe and
sound on our baking sheet, we can pop these into the
freezer for 20 minutes. We need to freeze this, otherwise all these
beautiful chunks of butter would just melt and ooze out
and this would be a disaster. So, the freezing is super important. Into the freezer and while they freeze, preheat your oven to
400 degrees Fahrenheit. My scones are out of the freezer, my oven's nice and hot. I'm gonna brush these guys with cream and by the way, 20 minutes
is the minimum time. You could make these a
day ahead, a week ahead, even a month ahead,
keep 'em in the freezer, just in a like a sealed bag and then pop them right
into the oven, from frozen. You will have to increase
the baking time slightly, so just watch out for those key signs, we'll tell you about. Some of these have some
powdery flour on them, which we don't like,
not a great mouth feel and the cream will take care of that. So, it's double, it'll
give us a golden finish, look a little smoother, and
you'll have a better mouth feel. You could pop these into the oven, but I like a final
optional flourish of sugar and I'm gonna go get some sanding sugar for my sprinkle drawer. This is just sugar that
has a bigger grain size, so it's more sparkly and
has a crunch, which I love. Into the oven, 400 degrees
for 20 to 25 minutes and I will tell you that
if they were extra frozen, give them a few extra minutes. They should be golden on
top and golden underneath. Let your scones cool for about 10 minutes then enjoy or transfer to a
wire rack to finish cooling, so they can stay nice and
crisp and not get soggy. Look at that beauty. Hmm, tender and soft on the inside, crisp on the outside and full
of blueberry, lemon flavor. Oh, my gosh. I hope you get a chance
to make this recipe. And if you like my videos, check out my breakfast treat playlist.
