Sunday morning's English scones

Yesterday I've been busy cooking for dinner so I didn't have time to prepare some bread for this morning. Usually when this happens I either cook crepes, pancake or English scones in the morning and in 30min we have a ready to eat breakfast.

This morning it was plain English scones. The recipe for a dozen 4cm scones is simple (based on recipe from BBC of course!!): 175g of flour, 1/2 tsp of baking powder, a bit of salt, 40g of soft butter, 80ml of milk or equivalent, 2tbsp of brown sugar, vanilla (I use exclusively fresh one, no extract, much tastier and love the black dots!!). After mixing all the ingredients and obtaining a nice dough I roll it in sticks of 4 cm diameter and cut thick slices of 1cm or more and line them on cooking paper. Bake in the oven for about 15min  (depending on thickness) at 180deg. And ready to eat!! With butter, jam, marmalade... 

This morning I served an apple-strawberry salad to complete the breakfast.

Crumpets

It's been sometimes I wanted something that changes from the usual scones/pancakes/crepes... I often prepare for breakfast and I was longing for English crumpets. I checked on my usual resource for English recipes: the bbc website and thought I could make crumpets right away. Not so simple. You need circles to bake them and you need baking soda, and instant yeast something I not often use. I must admit that I had to do some research too about the differences between instant yeast, active yeast, baking powder and baking soda...

So I finally manage to gather everything and cook them according to the bbc recipe. It was a little more fastidious and time consuming than expected but it was really worth it!!!

Some of the crumpets ready to be eaten!

The growing batter

Bakewell Tart

An English classic dessert, the bakewell tart, with almond, strawberry marmalade inside and a Royal Icing. And of course a cherry on the top! The recipe is simple (100g of soft butter, 170g of ground almond, 3 eggs, 2 spoons of flour, 100g of sugar. In small molds, put the mixture, half the mold, then a small spoon of marmalade and mixture again. In the oven for 10 minutes. Wait for the cakes to be cold. Make the frosting with 200g of icing sugar and the white of one egg. Put on the top of the cake. Add the cherry!)

Perfect for tea time, not too difficult to make and really impressive if you have guests!