Blueberry, Cranberry & Sultana Scones

I spent a large amount of my childhood on camping holidays, whether it was the Lake District, Devon or Cornwall, there was always a hill to climb, lake to walk around and obviously, a coffee shop selling fresh cakes. The only thing better than a home-made scone, is a home-made scone after you've been dragged on what seems like a never ending walk. I'm not one for camping these days, I prefer the comforts of a hotel (far too precious to sleep outdoors), but my love for scones has certainly continued. I made these this morning, they are so easy to make and they keep quite well. You can pretty much add any fruit you like to them, I raided the cupboards and added whatever I could find and came up with these.

Ingredients:
250g Self Raising Flour
Pinch Salt
60g Caster Sugar
50g Chilled, Unsalted Butter (Diced)
1 Egg (Beaten)
90ml Milk (Little extra for bushing on top)
50g Fresh Blueberries
25g Dried Cranberries
25g Sultanas
Zest of Half a Lemon
2/3tsp Demerera Sugar

Set the over to 180 Degrees/C. Put the flour, sugar and salt in a mixing bowl and add the chilled butter. Mix together with your fingertips until the butter is completely incorporated and the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Add the milk and the egg and mix together to form a dough - you can sprinkle a little more flour in if the mixture is too sticky. Add the fruit and lemon zest and mix in until it is fairly distributed through the dough.

Turn out the dough onto a floured surface and pat out until it is approximately 3cms thick. Using a 8cm Cutter, dip the edges in flour and cut out each scone, placing them on a baking tray. Keep patting out the dough and cutting more until you have used up the mix, you should get 8 or 9.

Once on the baking tray, brush each scone with a little milk and sprinkle over the demerera sugar to add some crunch. Then bake for 15/20 minutes until golden brown on the top and bottom.


The best thing about having scones at home, is that you can take as much jam and cream as you like - those little coffee shops never give you enough! I think these scones would go nicely with lashings of clotted cream and a blueberry or raspberry jam.

I have a few evenings off work this week, so I am already planning some new recipes to write about on here. I'm even going to attempt home-made gnocchi tomorrow, so fingers crossed!

Teagan thinks if she sits nicely, I might give her a scone - not likely. 

Welcome Back!

It's certainly been a while since I have posted up on here, but I'm officially back.  I've missed cooking over the past few months, my kitchen at university was so small I found it difficult to move my gigantic, clumsy limbs around the place in an orderly fashion - I'm messy enough when given a large space to work in let alone a tiny one, so I pretty much gave up on cooking anything too extravagant. However, now I have finished my degree I'm back in the comfort of my own kitchen with a lot more space and a lot more time to play with.

In other news, I applied to Masterchef a few weeks ago - I have wanted to apply for ages, but didn't ever get round to it. So another reason for coming back to my blog is that I need to teach myself to make loads of new things, just in case I get an audition!

Today I tried making my own pasta,  to make sheets so I could put together a lasagne for the family dinner. The pasta dough worked well, but I stupidly left my baby brother, Alex, in charge of making the cheese sauce for the lasagne. This resulted in a runny white liquid and a Le Cruset pan burnt to the point of no return. So we had tagliatelle and bolognaise instead...

This is how I made the pasta -it is easier than you think, especially with a pasta roller, takes ages but you can use a rolling pin.

Ingredients:
600g Pasta Flour (00')
6 eggs



This recipe makes a lot of pasta, so if you only need a bit for tortellini or anything similar you can halve the recipe. You can put all the ingredients in the food processor and mix until the egg and flour is combines, or you can do it the traditional way and make an egg-volcano and mix together by hand. Either way, you will need to knead the mixture until the dough feels smooth and not rubbery. It took me about 15 minutes and yes, my arms ache. Once you have finished kneading the dough, cling film it and leave it in the fridge for 30 minutes. I then used a pasta roller to roll out the pasta as thin as possible before cutting it into tagliatelli sized strips (about 10mm wide).

Teagan helping to make pasta

With the left over pasta dough, I made some little tortellini filled with chorizo and red pepper. To make the filling I finely chopped 50g of chorizo with a red pepper, 1 small red chilli (I'm sure you don't need to be told, but wash your hands after touching the chilli - I just learnt the hard way that chilli in the eye is not pleasant) and half a red onion and fried the mixture for 10 minutes on a low heat.
Click here for a good website which shows you how to fold the tortellini.

To cook the tortellini, I simply boiled them in salted water for 3-4 minutes. For the pasta sauce I used the same pan that I fried the chorizo in, added 2 finely chopped cloves of garlic to some olive oil and gently fried for two minutes before adding 1 carton of passata and a teaspoon of paprika. After seasoning with salt and pepper and leaving the sauce to simmer for 10 minutes, I added the cooked tortellini to cover them with the sauce before serving with a garnish of chopped basil.