Another Kitchen Adventure

I made scones for the first time last week.

Well, the first time and the second time — I made a preliminary batch on Thursday, just because I wanted them, and then I made another batch on Friday for game night with my friends.

It’s been a week and I still can’t decide if they’re my favorite thing to bake or if I’d rather hit my head on a brick wall than ever try to make them again.

I only learned how to cook recently, so it’s always an exciting experience to have a craving and then actually be able to make it for myself. During my shift at work on Thursday, I decided that chocolate chip scones sounded really good. I didn’t have the money to buy them, but I did have all the ingredients at home. Might as well give it a shot.

I think the destination was worth it, considering the scones were wonderful, but my God, the road there was littered with potholes and sharp corners and…y’know, I’m not convinced that there was any actual road involved.

I looked at several recipes, and they were all very specific that you must use cold butter when making your scone dough. Not room temperature, not warm, not melted. Cold. They always explained, in detail, something about how it creates steam pockets and layers and…I didn’t really care. Cold butter. Got it. They said to use a stand mixer, but I figured that if I put my hand mixer on “Low,” it would be fine.

Folks, it was not fine.

I should have anticipated this failure, considering my hand mixer is several years older than I am, but I still assumed that it would flawlessly combine flour, baking powder, sugar, and slices of cold butter, given enough time.

My kitchen counters are usually a dark gray color. Five minutes into my scone experiment, and they were almost completely white (and so was the black shirt I was wearing).

Okay, so the mixer wasn’t going to work. Neither was a spoon.

Using my hands, it took about twenty minutes to adequately mix the butter into the flour (but not too much, or you’ll ruin the layers!). After that, I had to use my hands again to mix the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients. Apparently, everything about scones is just too much for my mixer to handle.

By the time the dough was shaped and in the oven, I was starting to wonder if this whole ordeal had been worth it. After eating them, though, it was clear that it was.

But this was just the first batch.

I’ll let you imagine the mess I made when I decided to add raspberries to the second batch.