14/06/2018

Classic Sultana Scones

Name: Classic Sultana Scones
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 30 min
Ingredients: 350 g self raising flour (plus extra for rolling); 1.5 tsp baking powder; pinch salt; 90 g butter; 100 g caster sugar (plus extra for sprinkling); 100 g sultanas; 150 ml plain yogurt (or yogurt & water, milk, milk & water or buttermilk) (plus extra for brushing)

Classic Sultana Scones are so quick and easy, yet always feel like a treat. Serve with double or clotted cream and jam, or simply spread with a generous amount of butter. I think a recipe for Classic Sultana Scones should be in every cook’s repertoire.

Jump to Recipe

I love scones of all kinds, sweet or savoury. And the possibilities for flavouring them are pretty endless. But in this post I want to show you how to make Classic Sultana Scones.

Apart from being delicious, once you’ve mastered the simple recipe, you can use it as a base for dreaming up scones with all sorts of different flavours. How about Hot Cross Scones? or Apple & Cinnamon Scones?

HOW TO PRONOUNCE ‘SCONE’

I guess we should first clear up how to pronounce the word ‘scone’. This is something of an obsession in Britain!

Here, it can be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cone’ or ‘con’. Growing up in a working class family in the East Midlands, in our house scones (always homemade) were pronounced to rhyme with ‘cones’ and everyone we knew said it that way too.

The ‘con’ brigade, usually heard only in drawing rooms on TV, were seen as very posh and alien to us. So it’s a little strange to read that the ‘cone’ pronunciation is the one often regarded as the rather affected way of speaking. However, reading this article, it seems that geography largely accounts for the differences in pronunciation. ‘Cone’ is the norm in the Midlands, and ‘con’ in the North. Southern England seems to be split 50:50.

Anyway, sorry for the diversion. You’re here to make scones aren’t you?

QUICK TREAT

Whatever you call this traditional British treat, you can whip up a batch in around 30 minutes. And that includes the baking time! This means it’s scones I often turn to when I want to make something quick.

The great thing about Sultana Scones is that, traditionally at least, most British households would always have the ingredients to hand. All that’s required is flour, butter, sugar, dried fruit and milk. You don’t need pastry cutters either: a drinking glass will do.

EASY METHOD

The basic recipe is so simple. Start by rubbing butter into sifted self-raising flour, baking powder and a pinch of salt. Although self-raising flour already has raising agent in it, for scones I like to add additional baking powder to help get a really nice height.

Next, sugar and sultanas are stirred in, then the liquid to form a soft dough. I use plain, full-fat yogurt in my scones. I now make my own yogurt so always have some in, and it does make the scones light and fluffy. You could also use milk or buttermilk, or virtually any combination of yogurt, milk and buttermilk.

When forming the dough, start off with a rubber spoon or spatula to bring the mixture together, then switch to gently using your hands. Handling the dough as little as possible should help to keep the finished scones nice and soft inside, so just give it a few seconds’ light kneading.

Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface, no thinner than 2-3 cm. Stamp out the scones, re-rolling any scraps to use up all the dough. A 7cm cutter should give you 8 – 9 scones.

To give a slight crunch to the top of the finished scones, I brush them with a little yogurt, thinned with water, then sprinkle on some sugar before baking.

Part of the attraction of making scones is that they take very little time to cook. But this also means you can’t go wandering off and forget about them! I find that at 180C in my fan oven, scones are usually done in around 13 minutes.

Scones are best served slightly warm, spread with butter as a minimum. But if they’re not going to be eaten straight away, store in an airtight container or freeze once they’re completely cold. A few seconds in the microwave or a few minutes in a low oven will be enough to warm them through again.

CREAM-THEN-JAM OR JAM-THEN-CREAM?

If the controversy over the pronunciation of the word ‘scone’ isn’t bad enough, what’s really gets British people going is ‘jam first’ or ‘cream first’.

I’ve always been a cream-then-jam devotee. Apart from not wanting double or clotted cream sliding off slippery jam, isn’t it so much more visually appealing to see shiny, bright jewel-like jam on top, not hiding under a creamy canopy?

I’ve heard some people don’t butter their scones before adding the cream and jam. But I’m a butter fanatic so anything that can take butter, I want butter on it, please.

Actually, on a really good homemade scone, butter alone is still a lovely treat. When I was a child, that was how we usually ate them. Sometimes with Homemade Strawberry Jam or damson jam, but never cream.

However you eat yours, I think you’ll agree that Sultana Scones really are worth the small amount of effort needed to knock up a batch of these traditional yet versatile British treats.

SAVOURY SCONE RECIPES:

4.91 from 11 votes