Because I’m not much of a cook, I frequently SOS John to send me recipes, and he always comes through with easy recipes that impress. Some time ago, I had to bring dessert to a dinner party. Because store-bought wouldn’t do, a friend made a chocolate brownie cake for me, and I passed it off as my own.
John’s scones recipe below is easy enough for me, that I didn’t mess up on it. Further, if I do say so myself, this recipe makes much better scones than Whole Foods. — Annie
John’s Cranberry-Orange Scones
Ingredients:
- 4 cups plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons sugar, plus additional for sprinkling
- 2 tablespoons baking powder
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 3/4 pound cold unsalted butter, diced
- 4 extra-large eggs, lightly beaten
- 1 cup cold heavy cream
- 3/4 cup small-diced dried cranberries
- two tablespoons of orange zest
- 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
- 1 egg beaten with 2 tablespoons water or milk, for egg wash and then sprinkle a little sugar on top of each before baking.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine 4 cups of flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, baking powder, and salt. Blend in the cold butter at the lowest speed and mix until the butter is in pea-sized pieces. If you don’t have a paddle attachment for mixer, you can beat by hand, until pea-size texture is achieved.
Combine the eggs and heavy cream and quickly add them to the flour and butter mixture. Combine until just blended. Toss the cranberries with 1 tablespoon of flour, walnuts, orange zest and add them to the dough, and mix quickly. The dough may be a bit sticky.
Dump the well-combined dough out onto a well-floured surface. Flour your hands and a rolling pin and roll the dough 3/4-inch thick. You should see lumps of butter in the dough. Cut into squares with a 4-inch plain or fluted cutter, and then cut them in half diagonally to make triangles. Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
Brush the tops with egg wash. Sprinkle with sugar and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the outsides are crisp and the insides are fully baked.
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
View all posts by John →
