Raspberry and white chocolate scones - what not to do

One of my friends I was visiting with recently is taking a cooking/baking course and kindly let me taste some of the goodies.

The goodies on the go this day were raspberry and white chocolate scones. Hers were divine, light, amazingly scrummy and not too sweet. She sent me home with some and hubby and I devoured them. She gave me the recipe so I thought I'd give them a go, after all how hard could it be?

Firstly, (and you'd think this would only be sense) always make sure you've read the recipe so that you have the right ingredients in. Of course, I wasn't this smart! I'd taken a quick glance at the recipe before going out to get the weekly shop and only saw that I needed to get soda bread flour.

I started measuring the ingredients and then suddenly saw that I needed buttermilk..Of course I didn't have buttermilk, it's not something I keep in the house. So online I headed to see if I could make my own (recipe for disaster this especially when the local shop is only 5 minutes away).  I found a website which advised using 1 tablespoon of white vinegar per cup of milk. I thought it was worth a punt so bulldozed on anyway.

Another tip not to do is bake when trying to run a conversation, again something you'd thing is common sense after all you need to concentrate on what you're doing. My lovely mother in law came round and as I'd started baking thought I'd keep going. This of course led to scanning the recipe (I'm not very good at reading and listening at the same time) and throwing in probably a little extra of some ingredients.. This recipe was doomed from the start.

They actually didn't turn out too bad. (rather surprisingly!) After the first batch were cut out of the dough the raspberries started to ooze out when I tried to push the mixture together to get the rest cut out (I guess this is what happens when you put the whole box of raspberries in!) so they turned out a little darker when cooked but once the chocolate was drizzled over them they don't look too bad.

Scones after cooking

The final product

Not a total disaster but not the best attempt in baking at all. If you want to try making these and not making all the rookie mistakes I did here's how!

Ingredients

600g Soda Bread flour
75g Butter
75g Caster sugar
Pinch of salt
Punnet of raspberries (200g - can be less or more depending on how many you like in your scones)
50g White chocolate grated plus a little extra to drizzle on top
325 - 360ml buttermilk (don't let them get too wet or they won't rise)
1 egg beaten with a little milk to brush over the top to glaze scones

Method

Rub the butter into flour and salt until it resembles breadcrumbs, add sugar and grated white chocolate.

Make a well in the centre, pour in the buttermilk gradually and mix to a soft elastic consistency (until it's just damp enough to pick up dry ingredients off edge of bowl, but not sticky).

Put mixture onto a floured surface, gently knead, roll out with floured rolling pin until about 1 1/2cm thick.

Place washed raspberries on half of it and fold other half on top of them.

Level dough out and cut out with cutter.

Place on baking tray with flour on it.  Leave soon between scones.

Brush tops with the egg wash.

Bake in a hot oven 210 oC, 200 oC for fan oven for 15 - 20 minutes.

You know they're ready when you tap the bottom of them and they sound hollow.

Leave to cool on rack before melting a little white chocolate and drizzling it over the top of them.

Hopefully yours will turn out better than my attempt!