scones

22 June 2023

A few weeks ago, our local supermarket promoted original, traditional English clotted cream, scones and strawberry jam, obviously. We bought a jar but couldn’t find the scones. The clotted cream ended up in the refrigerator and we forgot about the scones. Fortunately, clotted cream keeps very well so when we spotted the jar some two weeks later, we decided to open it and taste the cream. Yummy! So, all we needed for our Cream Tea were scones. And since we couldn’t find them, we baked them ourselves.

What You Need

250 grams of Self Raising Flour
2/3 teaspoon Baking Powder
75 grams of Butter (room temperature)
30 grams of Sugar
120 grams of fresh Whole Milk
125 grams of Raisins
One egg
Pinch of Salt

What You Do

Start by soaking the raisins for 10 minutes in hot water. Drain and squeeze gently. This way the raisins will be tasty and moist. Lightly beat the egg, just enough to combine the white and the yolk. Now combine self raising flour, baking powder, butter and sugar until you have a crumbly pastry. Best is to use a hand mixer with kneading hooks. This may take some time. When well mixed, add half the egg and the milk. Make a smooth dough. Fold in the raisins and store the result in the refrigerator for one hour. Preheat your oven to 210 °C or 410 °F. Roll out the dough. We used a 7-centimetre (cookie) cutter. Coat the top of the scones with beaten egg. Allow to rest for 15 minutes. Coat the scones for the second time. Bake the scones for some 10 minutes. Keep an eye on your oven because the scones will bake very quickly!

Serve with a generous amount of English clotted cream and strawberry jam. The best way is to split the scone in two, cover each half with clotted cream and put the strawberry jam on top.

PS

If you want to see how our favourite Dutch Pâtissier Cees Holtkamp makes scones (in his home kitchen, supported by his granddaughter), then this video will help. It’s in Dutch (with YouTube provided subtitles). Please note that his list of ingredients is slightly different.

Lemon Curd

2 June 2022

A Lemon Meringue Pie, a Tarte au Citron or Scones with Lemon Curd: tasty, refreshing, bitter, sour, a bit sharp and sweet. We love it! Provided of course that the lemon is more than just juicy and sour.

This has been a bit of an issue over the past years. Similar to the German consumers who complained about the watery and flavourless Dutch tomatoes they bought around 1990, we think that most lemons lack aroma and taste. We tried limes, bought more expensive lemons, added a bit of yuzu, but in the end, we still missed the true taste and aroma of an old-fashioned lemon.

Until one day we bought a Bergamot lemon. Its aroma is intense, floral and long. The juice is sour, deeply citrusy, refreshing and bright. Exactly what we were looking for! We went home and prepared a lovely curd.

Recently we had a similar experience when we visited a dear friend. She grows a Makrut (or Thai) Lime tree, also known as Makrut Lime, in her garden mainly because she wants to use the fresh leaves in Thai and Indonesian dishes such as Tom Yum, Soto Ayam and various curries. The leaves have a complex citrus flavour with floral notes. We talked about the lovely yellow fruit and how you could use its very aromatic zest as well.
The fruit contains little juice, so when preparing a curd with Makrut limes, you need to add lime, Bergamot or lemon juice.

What You Need

65 ml of Lemon, Lime, Bergamot and/or Makrut Lime Juice
65 grams of Butter
100 grams of Sugar
One Egg
Zest

What You Do

Beat the egg, melt the butter and combine all ingredients. Make sure the sugar is dissolved. Cook Au Bain Marie until you have the right consistency. Or transfer to your microwave, put it on 50% or 70% power and heat with intervals of 20-30 seconds. Mix between the intervals. This is a very precise way of heating the mixture and it gives you full control over the process. Towards the end of the process you may want to reduce the power or shorten the intervals. The percentage and the duration of the intervals depend on your microwave and the bowl you use. We use a microwave saucepan (£1,29 only) and it works perfectly. The material doesn’t absorb warmth, so the mixture doesn’t get extra heated when you stop the microwave. Pass through a sieve (you don’t want the zest in the curd), cool in a water bassin and store in a jar.
The curd keeps for a week in the refrigerator .

PS

Around 1992 a German television program characterised the Dutch tomatoes as watery and tasteless, and called them ‘wasserbombe’. The short-term impact was enormous: the Dutch tomato went from 50% market share in Germany to something close to zero. Longer term the impact was very different: Dutch producers invested in their product, making their tomatoes tastier, richer and more diverse.