How to bake date scones in Winter time

One of the great pleasures in life is to wakeup to the fragrance of freshly baked scones. And then to eat them with raspberry or strawberry jam off my vintage Noritake tea set!!! Yeah!!!! I love my antique Noritake porcelain!

My sister taught me this cool and easy way to bakes scones which doesn't use butter.

You need
Self-raising flour
Thicken Cream
Clear bottled Lemonade
Fresh Dates preferred/ or dried packet ones
Flour
and
1 big bowl
1 big sieve
1 measuring cup
2 trays wrapped in aluminum foil
1 cookie cutter

First: Measure and sieve 3 cups of self raising flour into the bowl. Remember Self raising flour! You can't use ordinary flour alone because they'll end up hard as rocks.

Variation: If you want - you can do 2.5 cups of self-raising flour and add half a cup of ordinary flour. I find that using 100% self-raising flour gives the scones a bitty bicarb taste.

2 : Measure and pour 1 cup of Lemonade

3. Measure and pour 1 cup of thickened cream (if you swap 2 and 3 around it doesn't matter)

4. You can also add in a pinch of salt. Stir until the contents turns into dough like blu-tac. Don't handle the dough for too long unnecessarily otherwise you'll make it too hard.

5. Remove the seeds and chop up the dates. Mix them into the dough. I prefer fresh dates. They taste much creamier than the packet ones. The packet ones I find are too dry and the baking process makes them even more harder. Use fresh moist dates!!!

6. Make sure your bench-top table is cleaned and cleared. Rub the table and your hands with a handful of ordinary flour (not self-raising flour) to prevent the dough from sticking. Rubbing the flour onto the cutter helps too. I use ordinary flour here to reduce the baking soda aftertaste.

Now dump the dough onto the table and flatten it with your hand quickly. Flatten it to about an inch high and start cutting the scones out with the cutter and placing them into the baking tray. Make the scones the same nice shapes so they don't turn out weird and don't bake evenly.

7. Pre-heat the oven to 200C before putting the scones in.

8. Once the tray is filled you place it into the Oven. Make sure to leave ample spacing for the scones to expand on the tray otherwise they'll end up growing into each other. If they do, don't worry about it. Its just that their sides will be a little undercooked which can be easily fixed by pulling them apart and re-baking them for a minute.

9. Count 15 minutes. Take the interval to wash up and clean the kitchen. All done? Maybe another 5 more minutes? This is a bit fickle. Some ovens bake faster than others.

Now pull the scone/tray out of the oven. If you like them browner and less moist, you can leave them in the oven for a few more minutes. Always check to prevent them from burning.

10. Serve with hot tea and coffee. And eat with plenty of butter and strawberry jam!!!


Update:

sprinkle the baking trays, your HANDS, and the cookie cutter with Flour

adding the cream first before the self-raising flour seems to help

do not add the dates with the flour - add the dates in after the dough has been made


I also like to add in orange peel skin. Take a very citric orange skin - nothing to bland -  slice off the white interior layer - then finely chop up the skin - and as you roll the dough - add it in.