Well, I’ve been rather remiss of late with my blog, but that’s because we’ve had so many guests that I haven’t been experimenting with any new recipes.

However, Bid and Paul came over from Hornby for our regular Friday Feast last week and brought us a truckload of berries–strawberries, raspberries, and the most glorious blueberries you’ve ever seen. We ate them on Friday and Saturday and I made a huge fruit salad with them on Sunday, but we still had about four cups of gorgeous berries, so I decided to make a version of these Marionberry Lavender Scones from Post-Punk Kitchen. Now, if you recall, I am not a good dessert maker, nor am I a good baker (except for my bread, which I keep refining). My mum was a master scone maker, and I LOVE scones, but mine always turn out like little hockey pucks. I did have some luck recently with this recipe for Rosemary Scones from OhSheGlows, but I consider that a fluke.

Once I was well into the recipe, however, I realized another reason I hate this kind of baking: it’s super labour intensive and it uses a shitload of dishes, bowls, measuring spoons, etc. Not really my kind of thing all around. Plus, there seems to be a much greater risk that what you’ve poured all this energy into will simply not turn out.

The first thing I did was pick some of my lavender, but I couldn’t figure out whether I was supposed to include the green bits or just the flowers, so I spent half an hour picking the tiny little flowers. As it was, I got only about half as many as I was supposed to have. Furthermore, in the finished product, you cannot taste, see, or smell the lavender!!

The blueberries were nice and firm, so I didn’t have to worry about them mushing up the batter into a purple nightmare (though I was realllly careful as I folded them in as well).

So here’s the adapted version (I doubled the recipe because I had so many blueberries)

Blueberry Lavender Scones

Makes 27 scones

2 1/2 cups almond milk

4 teaspoons apple cider vinegar

6 cups flour

4 tablespoons baking powder

1 cup sugar, plus extra for sprinkling

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup fresh culinary lavender, chopped

1 cup coconut oil spread into a sheet and frozen for about 20 minutes (see this method)

4 tablespoons canola oil

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

4 cups blueberries

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 425 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Measure out the almond milk and add the vinegar to it. Set aside to curdle.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Add the coconut in small clumps, then use knives to cut it into the flour until it appears like small pebbles.  Mix in the lavender.

Create a well in the center and add the almond milk, oil and vanilla. Mix with a wooden spoon just a bit, then fold in the berries. Mix again until everything is moistened, but don’t over mix.

Use a 1/4-cup measuring cup to scoop the scones out on to the baking sheet.

Sprinkle tops with a bit more sugar, then bake for 20 minutes, until tops are firm to the touch and lightly browned. Serve warm!

So I baked the first batch at 375 for 20 minutes (according to the instructions on PPK), but they were nowhere near done, so I ended up baking them for TWENTY MORE MINUTES. Even so, they seemed a little underdone to me (though after they cooled, they were fine).

I baked the next batch at 425 (according to the OhSheGlows biscuit recipe) for 20 minutes, and they were even better! I also slid them onto the baking stone which was super hot, so I think that helped as well:

I did this with the final batch as well, and they turned out fine:

The ultimate result is fine, but just okay-fine, not the fine scones my mum used to make. These are a bit more rubbery–like the ones they sold in the cafeteria where I taught college for twenty-odd years.

Update: These freeze brilliantly and have been getting rave reviews from Em and James, so I guess they were better than I thought!!

And speaking of my mum, she called while I was baking these and told me not to peek in the oven before the prescribed cooking time was up or I’d ruin the scones.

The reason she called?

She got stuck in the walk-in bathtub at her senior living residence and THE FIRE DEPARTMENT HAD TO BE CALLED!!! Two strapping young firefighters had to lift my 92-year-old mum out of the tub!!! She was laughing her head off as she told me about it though, so I don’t think she was traumatized.