I spent this past weekend down at the beach celebrating a friend’s bachelorette.  I volunteered to help with Sunday morning breakfast, and decided on pre-making several batches of scones to freeze at home and then bring down to the beach to bake fresh for breakfast.  Our resources down at the beach are somewhat limited.  We are not on the power grid, and have to make do with some limited solar power and a dysfunctional generator.  With that in mind, and knowing that I would be dragging myself out of bed after after 11+ hours of drinking and only about 6- hours of sleep, I went into preplanning mode.

To me: fruit + scones = meant to be.  This is probably in a large part the American showing through.  We just can not leave things be.  We always seem to need to add something more.  While most scone eaters are perfectly content with keeping their scones simple to allow the individual to later decide how to slather them in cream and jam, Americans envision scones as a standalone pastry that they should be able to just grab and eat – no toppings necessary.  I created this scone with that in mind.  The jam and the cream are baked into the scone.  All of the more traditional scone flavors are still there, but no additional toppings are needed.

Strawberry Cream Scones

Recipe makes 9 scones.

Ingredients:

• 1 quart of Strawberries
• 1 cup Sugar + 2 tbsp Sugar
• 3 cups Flour
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 3 tsp Baking Powder
• 10 tbsp cold Butter
• 3 Eggs
• 1/2 cup Cream

Directions:

1. The day before you assemble your scones (you can skip this step by using store bought strawberry jam):
   1. Puree the strawberries.
   2. Place the strawberries in a large pot with 1 cup of sugar, and proceed to cook the berries until shiny bubbles appear.  This will take about 20 minutes over a high heat.
   3. Set the cooked puree aside to cool, for a few hours.
   4. Cover a rimmed baking sheet with wax paper.
   5. Once the puree has cooled sufficiently, pour the puree out onto the rimmed baking sheet.
   6. Place in the freezer overnight.
2. Preheat the oven to 400 F.
3. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
4. In a food processor combine the butter with the dry ingredients until crumbles start to form. (you can also do this step by hand with a pastry cutter)
5. Add the eggs, and continue to pulse the dough in the machine until the eggs are well combined.
6. Add the heavy cream.  This should bring all the dough together into a uniformed blob.
7. Remove the dough from the food processor, and roll the dough out until it is about 1/4″ thick.
8. Using a large (2″ diameter) circular cookie cutter cut out the scones.
9. Using a small (1/2″ diameter) circular cookie cutter cut out the centers of half of the larger circles.
10. Working quickly, remove the strawberries from the freezer and use the smaller cookie cutter to cut out small rounds of the puree.
11. Place the puree rounds in the center of the whole scone bottoms, and cover with the hollowed out rounds so that the puree shows through.
12. Place the scones on the baking sheet leaving plenty of space in between so that they may grow as they bake.
13.  Bake the scones for ~ 20 minutes.
14. Allow the scones to cool for about 10 minutes before serving so that the strawberry jam can set.