Butter scones with jam

Every once in a while, I like to take a break from making all these super sweet new dishes like cookies and brownies and make something a bit more classic - something like scones. If you are looking for something to bake for your slightly older family members (parents, grandparents), I would say these treats are definitely a good choice!! Jump to recipe

The reason being that these scones have a super simple yet timeless taste to them that can be paired with any topping of your choice (clotted cream, jam, both, or even eaten plain - yes they are that good, it practically just becomes a giant soft butter cookie!!). Personally I enjoy eating them with just the jam but I think the traditional British way is to eat it with both jam and clotted cream. The real debate comes when people start to argue about what they put first, jam or the clotted cream HAHA, let me know in the comments of this post what method you use to eat your scones, especially if you have any special combinations, I would love to try it!

Name : Butter scones

Description: Buttery soft and crumbly scones with sweet strawberry jam and a cup of tea

Flavour Rating: 7.5/10 (feel free to add an extra point to this section if you are making these scones for a "older person". for the younger generation, this might not be the most appealing BUT trust me, this is one of my mom's favourite and most requested desssert)

Difficulty rating: 3/10 (it's super quick and easy to do this and screw up rate is super low!)

Occasion: Tea time snack for afternoon family gathering Some highlights of this blog will be some Tips to get a butterier and crumblier taste, The difference between a scone and a biscuit and lastly a little interesting BTS of my video filming!!

Tips to get a butterier and crumblier taste

If there's something that sets apart a good scone and a okay scone (because I believe no scone can be screwed up to taste), is the crumbliness and butteriness level. Now this is quite a difficult thing to achieve if you don't know what are the factors/ingredients that contribute to these characteristics in the so called "perfect scones" BUT fear not, because I am going to give you some tips so that you can (hopefully) achieve this perfection the first time around.

Don't overwork the dough

Overworking the scone dough will also overwork the gluten, which leads to scones that are tough and chewy compared to light and crumbly.
It might be easy for you to visualise it as - the less you knead and work the dough, the looser, test tight and thus --> crumblier the scones will be (instead of tight and springy)

2. Work with a cold dough (cold ingredients, keep the dough in the fridge)

Using cold ingredients (especially butter) as this helps to prevent butter from melting before the scones are baked, instead leaving it to only melt in the oven while baking, bringing the flakiest and crumbliest end result!
Keeping the dough cold by putting it in the refrigerator after you cut them out to individual pieces also helps to ensure the butter in your dough doesn't melt before baking. I know it is always a pain when you read a recipe that asks you to chill dough in the fridge before baking because that means you have to wait a bit longer before you can eat some delicious treats but TRUST me, its so much more worth it. (I personally am still working on my patience with baking because I realised that the butter in my dough was melting while I was kneading it, probably due to me not keeping it in the fridge for long enough or using not cold enough ingredients LOLL)

3. Use a pastry cutter/fork to combine the dry ingredients and butter

This helps to cut the fats (particularly solid butter), helping to keep it in chunks (so you get some pockets of delicious butter) rather than combining it fully with the flour. lumps are what you want to achieve!!

One thing I still want to try out is laminating my dough more, as I feel that that would help me get even flakier scones! SO if I do try this out and It works, I will edit this blog so that yall can try it as well ((:

Difference between a scone and a biscuit

Though scones and biscuits look pretty similar on the outside, be careful not to mistake them because they are pretty different dishes.

ooh just look at that layer, you know you made a good scone when it can easily split it in half

Proportion of ingredients

Scones has less butter and more liquids (heavy cream/milk) than biscuits
Different types of scones also have different ingredients sometimes (American scones add eggs in the dough but the classic British scones are actually eggless!) (American scones also typically like to add A LOT of butter and sugar into the scones, whereas British scones tend to add the extra sugar and ingredients on top of the scones when they are done through adding jam and clotted cream)

2. Add ins (savoury or sweet)

If you do try to take a different spin to your dessert by adding in some add ins for extra flavour, take note that biscuits typically have savoury add ins like cheese or chives while scones have sweet add ins like dried currants or raisins. yummy

3. Taste

Biscuits are fluffier and flakier while scones are crumblier and more pastry like. No matter which one you end up choosing though, they are both a delicious choice!

BTS (behind the scene) of my video filming + interesting results

As an aspiring home baker/influencer, of course one of the important parts of my baking process is the filming of it (so that I can use it as content on my Instagram account). Recently I have been reflecting on how I have been taking pictures and videos and I realised something - I hate it. AH yes I hated it. I felt like my videos were all taken in bad lighting, bad angles and overall were quite un-pleasing to look at.

In comparison to my favourite bakers (@bromabakery) who has such a nice Instagram layout with a white marble theme, super clear, delicious shots of her baked goods and the prettiest of natural light, i felt like a loser. SO i embarked on my mission to change my instagram layout. Let me list down some of these ideas.

Ensuring my baked goods were plated on white backgrounds (wall, table, plates)
Making sure to get MANY (and by many i mean like 50+) shots of every possible angle of my baked good so i had options to use later (this can be done really easily as long as you have a good tripod, which i recently got! It comes with many adjustment settings that allows me to get shots from far away, to super close up vertically above)
Filming and taking pictures during daytime so i could get natural light (trust me, GAME CHANGER!! It’s so much better when you don’t have to artificially edit dark pictures taken 10pm after a long day of baking)
Getting shots of the baked goods both as a whole and when cut open/served (so for scones, I got pictures of the whole item as well as it split in half with jam) (For cakes, that means getting pictures of the whole cake as well as a cake slice).
Removing my blog advertisements from my instagram page (initially I thought that it would look super aesthetic to have those colourful pages as a post on my instagram but i am now realising how PAINFUL it is to look at those colours. So yeah! No more doing that. I will still be posting the short versions of my blogs on my instagram story but it will no longer be staining my page)

With some of these changes that I made, i was SUPER shocked to see almost immediate results. Now i am not too sure if this is a fluke or some sort of algorithm but just look the differences in statistics below.

On the left is the statistics from my old baking video (dark lighting, close up blurry shots etc) VS the statistics on the right from this new video (natural lighting, better angles etc). I was l literally just checking the views as i usually do to monitor its growth so i could figure out if i was doing something right and i was SO SHOCKED because this is now my most wathched video yet!

Not only was the view count interesting but look at the number of NON FOLLOWERS who watched it too! Thats practically 2000 non followers, which is absolutely crazy. Now i have a high feeling that this might be some random bots who watched my videos…BUT you never know, it could be real. Only time will tell, so let me try making something else again and I’ll get back to yall on how it turned out HAHA

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