Hi Bold Bakers! Being Irish of course I'm going to honor St. Patrick's Day, so I have
a new and improved traditional Irish scone recipe for you. You loved the one I shared
two years ago, well this one is bigger and bolder. The recipe can be found on BiggerBolderBaking.com
along with all of my other recipes. Scones are incredibly easy to make and you can whip
them up in no time. They're something that's known as a quick bread, you mix them all up
by hand in the one bowl. Into a large bowl we’re going to add self-raising flour, and
some baking powder. And then mix these two ingredients together well. So self-raising
flour is a really common flour that we use at home in Ireland. It is just plain flour
mixed with baking powder and I have a recipe on my website of how you can easily make it
at home, and it works the exact same way. Okay, this is good. Now for my next trick,
I have some frozen butter. Check that out. As they say in Ireland, “as hard as the
hobs of hell,” it is rock solid. And what I'm going to do with this is I'm going to
have a grater here, and I'm going to grate it directly into my bowl, into my flour. And
what this does, it gives you tiny little bits of butter all the way throughout, and then
what this does when it bakes, is it releases steam, and it makes your scones rise. It's
a really fantastic little trick. If you were to look in my freezer at any given time, I
always have frozen butter in there, because this trick works really well for biscuits
and for pastry-making, it just makes it really light and flaky. So now a little tip when
you're grating in the butter, keep the paper on, so it protects your fingers from the grater.
Usually what I do is I cut a little bit extra butter, more than I need, and then I use that
little bit of a cushion to protect my fingers. And look at that. Lovely, really finely grated
butter. All uniform, this is fantastic. So that's our butter. Now next into here I'm
going to add in a little bit of sugar. Scones aren't overly sweet, but they do have a little
bit of sweetness to them. Because you serve them with butter, jam, cream, so you don't
need them to be overly sweet. And then next, because I like raisin scones, I'm going to
add in some raisins. Now if you don't like raisins, feel free to leave them out, but
you can also add in chocolate chips, maybe some frozen berries, or even cherries would
be really nice. And then just take a fork and just mix these all together. What I like
to do personally is put my hands in there, and just make sure that the butter is worked
all the way throughout the flour, so then you really know what's going on. Okay gorgeous.
Fantastic. I'm just going to move this over to the side and we’re going to mix up our
wet ingredients. So into a jug I'm going to add some full fat milk, and some eggs. And
then whisk these ingredients together. Irish people are some of the biggest consumers of
tea so it makes perfect sense that when we have a cup of tea, we have a buttery scone
to go with it. Oftentimes you'd have it for lunch or even in the late afternoon, can’t
beat a good cup of tea and a scone. So now here is the trick about adding in liquid.
Maybe hold a little bit back, don't add it all in at once because once you add it in,
if your dough is too wet, you cant take it back, so just add in the majority of it, and
then see if you need that little bit extra. What you're looking for here is no a soggy,
wet dough, you're actually looking for something a little on the dry side. And then we’re
going to pull it together with our hands. So for those of you who don't know, I went
to a really famous cooking school in Ireland called Ballymaloe Cookery School, run by a
woman called Dorian Allen, and one of her big things when making scones and Irish soda
bread was to use a big claw. Just like in the movie Liar, Liar when he has a claw, you
want a big claw to pull your dough gently around. You don't want to over-work this dough
and toughen your flour. You want it to be light and airy. Now I'm seeing already that
my dough does need this little bit of reserved liquid, so I'm just going to go ahead and
add that in there, and then pull my dough together with my hands until it forms a ball.
So in no time at all my dough has come together, any little loose bits I’ll squish in there.
Then I'm going to turn it out onto my counter, lovely. Now if you want to just toss a little
bit of flour on your work surface, so your dough can move around. And then all I'm going
to do is, with my hand, press it out until it’s around an inch to an inch and a half
thick. I like really thick scones. So just push it down with your hands, you don't even
need a rolling pin for this. Super easy. I think this is why Irish mammies like it, it’s
easy, all in one go, fantastic. Okie dokie. Once it’s to the thickness that you like,
I have my scone cutter here. This is around a three-inch scone cutter, so nice and big.
And then just go ahead and cut out all of your scones. Look what lovely big shape they
are. Now when I used to work in bakeries one thing that we used to do, we used to make
scones then actually freeze them raw at this stage and then we would take them out, let
them defrost for around 10, 15 minutes, and then pop them into the oven, and you would
have freshly baked off scones, so feel free to do that. So then you always have something
nice in the freezer for when people drop in. Now always with scones you have a little bit
of a knobby bit of dough always left over, so just kind of mush him up together. You
might get one more scone out of him. Gorgeous. Now just put your scones onto a baking tray.
So now here's a little trick that my mammie taught me. Rather than waste an egg for egg
wash, I have a little bit of liquid left in my jug where I had the egg and the milk so
what I'm going to do is dip my fingers in there. Now don't judge me but my mum always
used her fingers, she never used a brush, which is funny because one of my pet peeves
is actually washing pastry brushes. So I'm all about doing it this way. And then just
gently glaze the top. This little bit of glaze will just make them golden brown and give
them a lovely color. You just need a tiny bit. And what's the point in wasting an egg?
Okay gorgeous. Our scones are ready to go into a hot oven. Bake your scones off at 425º
Fahrenheit or 210º Celsius for roughly 10-12 minutes or until they're golden brown on the
outside. So because the oven is so hot, scones take no time to cook at all, and just check
out these beauties. They are golden brown all over, which means they're lovely and crisp
on the outside, and fluffy on the inside, which is exactly what you want from a scone.
These are looking fantastic. Now in Ireland we go all out, man. We take no prisoners,
when it comes to scones, we have butter, jam, cream, the whole shebang. So just put whatever
you want on here, I strongly recommend some Irish butter because it’s nice and salty
and really rich, some jam, and you know what, you've gone this far, you may as well put
cream on there too. This recipe is definitely new and improved, there's no doubt about it.
They are buttery, fresh from the oven, they are warm and soft, and the outside is lovely
and crunchy. This is what a scone should be. They say everyone is a little bit Irish on
St. Patrick's Day, so make sure you enjoy the festivities and try out this recipe. Thank
you so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed this extra Irish episode, and I’ll see you
back here really soon, for more Bigger Bolder Baking.