Today on Sugar Spun Run I'll be showing you how to make lemon poppy seed scones.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers! Today's recipe is a fun a springtime-y twist on my favorite
basic scone recipe. These scones are really simple to make and, just like with
my traditional scone recipe, we're going to start by preheating our oven to 375
degrees Fahrenheit. Next, just like with my classic recipe, we're going to be
using our food processor. Now if you don't have a food processor you can
certainly make this using a pastry cutter or a grater. I'll include
instructions for that in the recipe, but today I'll be using my food processor.
Now we'll start by adding 2 cups of all-purpose flour to the basin.
We're going to add 1/3 cup of granulated sugar.
1 and 1/4 teaspoons of baking powder.
If you're using unsalted butter you would also add 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Today I'm
going to be using salted butter so I'm going to skip that but I am going to be
adding 1 tbsp of poppy seeds here. I'll place the lid on our food processor and
we'll just briefly pulse the ingredients together so that they're completely combined.
Now once your dry ingredients are combined, you're going to need your
butter. This recipe uses one stick, or 1/2 cup of butter. Again I'm using salted
butter so I left the salt out. If you can get your hands on your European butter use
it. It makes great tasting scones. Now if you think of it toss your butter in the
freezer for about 15 minutes before you begin this recipe. The colder your butter the better.
Do not use room-temperature or warm butter for this recipe.
Now I'm going to cut this butter into tablespoon sized
pieces and just to scatter the pieces evenly over the dry ingredients in my food processor.
Tablespoon-ish sized pieces. It does not have to be exact.
We'll also be adding one tablespoon of fresh lemon zest to this recipe to get
that great natural lemon flavor. Now I'm usually able to get one and a
half tablespoons out of a single lemon. Now when you're zesting this lemon you
do want to make sure that you don't go too deep. You want to just get the
surface layer. If you go too far into the lemon and, you get that white rind layer,
that's actually called the lemon pith, and it will make your scones bitter.
So you can see here with the lemon that I'm zesting here I went right to that white layer, but I didn't zest through it.
So once you've added your lemon we are just
going to pulse these ingredients together again until the mixture
resembles coarse crumbs. You want to make sure that butter is nicely cut up into the flour mixture.
You also don't want to overdo it because you don't want to make your
butter too warm. Having that cold butter in there is key to those nice flaky scone layers. Let's take a look at this.
Now the next ingredient you need is
1/2 cup of heavy cream, and you want this to be nice and cold as well. We're going
to add 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract to that for a little bit of flavor and
then we'll just pour this over our dry ingredients.
Now we'll just pulse everything together until all the ingredients start to clump together
And I like to take my dough to this point where it's really starting to cling
together. It hasn't clumped to form a solid ball yet,
but it's starting to really cling together. Now what I'm going to do is
I'll transfer this to a clean surface.
Now I'm just gonna use my hands to work this dough together into a ball,
and then I'm going to fold this dough over itself several times. This is going to help encourage flaky layers.
Rotate it. Fold it in half over itself.
Rotate it again.
Fold it over itself one more time
And now I'm going to form this into a disc that's about six inches in diameter.
Now cut your disc of scone dough into 8 even wedges. I'm going to be using a
sharp knife to do this, and when I cut the wedges, I'm going to be pressing
straight down. This helps encourage the scones to rise straight up so that they
don't look all wonky when they come out of the oven.
I'm just going to transfer each wedge onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet.
Now let's take these over to our preheated oven where they will need to bake for about 15 to 17 minutes.
And you'll want to let the scones cool completely on the baking sheet.
So while the scones are cooling let's make our lemon glaze. This is super simple to make.
We're going to start with 1 and 1/4 cups of powdered sugar. Now you're also going
to need about 1 and 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice. You can use a bottle of lemon
juice but since we just zested that lemon I'm going to squeeze out the juice from this lemon.
And you can absolutely fish out the seeds if you'd like, but
they're going to fall to the bottom so they're not really going to be in your
glaze. So it's not a big deal if you do or you don't. I'm also going to add one
and a half teaspoons of water. It may need a little bit more water. We'll see
how the consistency looks. And I'll also add a 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract for a little depth of flavor.
So now you're just gonna whisk everything together until it's nice and smooth.
And the great thing about this glaze is it's pretty much impossible to mess up. If
it's too thick you can add a little bit more water to thin it out some. This is
actually looking a little bit thin so I'm going to whisk in a little bit more powdered sugar.
If you actually measure your lemon juice instead of just
squeezing it right into the bowl you'll end up with the right consistency.
My videographer, A.K.A. Zach is giving me a really hard time about that right now.
Alright so we're adding a little bit more powdered sugar because we want to
have the right consistency, and we also want to have the right taste. We don't
want this glaze to be too tart. We don't want it to be too sweet.
And right now it looks like we finally have the right balance. So when you pull your whisk out
of the icing, first of all the we should be nice and smooth, and when
you pull your whisk out it should drizzle back in slowly, and the drip that
falls back in should hold its shape for just about a second or so before it
dissolves back into the frosting. So this finally looks good. So we can go ahead and dip our cooled scones.
Now ideally you would let your glaze set before
you dig into your scones. It'll only take about 15 minutes. This sets pretty
quickly but I don't have that kind of patience. So I'm just gonna go ahead and
dig in. Now I hope you guys enjoyed this recipe. If you try it out please let me
know what you think. I always love hearing from you.
Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
I love the texture from the poppy seeds.