Lemon-Poppy Seed Scones

This past weekend, with hurricane Irene in the forecast, my plan was to cook all day on Sunday while riding out the storm.

How does the saying go........"life is what happens when you're making other plans"......or something like that?

My plans to cook all day were dashed when the electricity went out at 11:30, but thanks to an early start I was able to cook my scones before we lost power!

This recipe is for a small batch (I didn't want to overdo it since only three of us in the house will eat scones), but you can easily double the ingredients and cut the dough into 8 wedges instead of 4.

Today's Playlist

• "I Will Follow You Into The Dark"......Death Cab For Cutie
• "Animal"......Neon Trees
• "Misery Business".......Paramore
• "Perfect Situation".......Weezer
• "No One Knows"......Queens Of The Stone Age
• "Always Something"........Cage The Elephant
• "On My Way"......Billy Boy On Poison
• "I And Love And You".....The Avett Brothers
• "Island In The Sun".......Weezer

Lemon-Poppy Seed Scones

• 1 cup flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon poppy seeds
• juice and zest of 1 lemon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup cold butter, cut into small pieces
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Gather your ingredients.

Zest your lemon.

Take the now-bald lemon and squeeze the juice out of it.  You need about 2 1/2 tablespoons of juice, I just eeked out this amount from my small lemon.  Note to self: buy bigger lemons.

In a large bowl, combine the flour....

....sugar....

.....poppy seeds.......

.....lemon zest......

.....baking powder.....

.....baking soda and salt.

Stir it up.

Cut the butter into small pieces.  Cut the butter into the dry ingredients until it resembles coarse crumbs.

You could use a pastry cutter to do this.  Every time I use a pastry cutter, I end up with a gunky pastry cutter and no "coarse crumbs."

I prefer the two-knife method.  Just keep on criss-crossing those knives until the butter is cut into itty-bitty pieces and coarse crumb-like.

Sort of like this.

Then pour the cream and two tablespoons of the lemon juice (that's right, only two tablespoons, reserve what's left of the lemon juice because you will need it for your icing) into the coarse-crumb mixture.

Stir it just until dough begins to form and stick together.

Shape the dough into a ball and transfer onto a cookie sheet.  I always line my cookie sheets.  If I had parchment paper that's what I would have used, but since I was out of parchment paper I used aluminum foil.

Anything to make cleanup easier, that's my motto.

Press the ball into a disk, about 6 inches in diameter.  If you double this recipe, you will have about an 8-inch disk.

Cut the disk into 4 wedges.  (And if you double the recipe, you will cut your disk into 8 wedges.)

I separate the wedges so they have room to expand.  With four wedges this is easy to do; if you look at the picture you can see that the upper-right and lower-left wedges haven't been moved at all.  I just slid the other two wedges away from the center and that was all it took.

Place the scones into your preheated oven and bake about 15 minutes, until the edges are starting to turn golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center of one of the scones comes out clean.

While you are waiting for the scones to bake, prepare your icing.  Mix the confectioners' sugar with 1 to 2 teaspoons of the remaining lemon juice (hopefully, you did not have a tiny juice-stingy lemon like I did and you have enough lemon juice remaining).  I barely eeked out one extra teaspoon of extra lemon juice.  If, for some reason, you don't have enough lemon juice, you can simply substitute water for the lemon juice.

Stir until it's smooth and good drizzling consistency.

Remove your scones from the oven and drizzle with the lemon-sugar glaze.

I also sprinkled a bit of large-crystal sugar on top of the glaze.

If my day of cooking was going to be cut short due to power loss, I'm glad that this is the one recipe I was able to cook.

We were forced to do other fun things that we don't normally find time to do.........not a bad thing at all.

Enjoy!