A book and a recipe

[jaunthie]

I just finished reading a book called Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, by Holley Bishop. It's a very charming read and I quite enjoyed it. I was sufficiently inspired by it to play around with honey in cooking today, both in coming up with a marinade for tonight's chicken, and in devising a recipe for honey-ginger blueberry scones for fisherbear. The chicken came out all right, but I'll definitely want to adjust some things if I experiment that way again. The scones, though, were a definite treat, and worth writing down. Here's the recipe I came up with for honey scones (to which you could add things like ginger, blueberries, whatever):

• 1 cup flour
• 3-4 tbs salted butter, cut into small pieces
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 generous spoonfuls of honey
• 1/4 to 1/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Combine flour and baking powder in a bowl.  Add butter and mix with fingers or a pastry blender until butter is incorporated; dough will look like 'sand and pebbles'. Add honey and a splash of the milk; mix together.  Keep adding milk a splash at a time until the dough comes together.  Turn out dough onto a lightly floured board and knead 4-6 times, folding dough over onto itself each time.  Flatten dough into a round 1/2-3/4 inches thick and cut into 4-6 triangles (or to be precise about it, wedges).  Put triangles onto a nonstick cookie sheet and bake for 7-10 minutes.  Serve warm.

I grated a thumb-sized piece of fresh, peeled ginger to the whole mix and folded in a bunch of frozen blueberries into fisherbear's scones.  He liked them very much.  Not being a fan of blueberries, I mixed in some cinnamon into my half of the dough.  I meant to add fresh lime juice as well, but I forgot.  A pity, because while my scones were good, they would have been better with the lime.  Oh well, I guess I'll just have to try again sometime. :-)

Comments

[monkeybard]

Oo! Sounds yummy! And I have all those ingredients. I'm thinking breakfast tomorrow... :)

[jaunthie.livejournal.com]

Note: this recipe kicks even more ass when you slather the scones with rose-petal jam. Just sayin'. ;-)

[hiker-chick.livejournal.com]

Just for curiosity, is the "generous" in "generous spoonfuls of honey" because it's impossible to get all the honey off the spoon after you've got it, well, on the spoon?

If I saw a listing for a musical group called Generous Spoonfuls of Honey, I'd consider going.

[jaunthie.livejournal.com]

Oo! You and me both; that'd be a fabulous name for a band!

As for "generous spoonfuls of honey", yes, that's at least in part because getting it off the spoon is tricky, and partly because I don't really measure certain ingredients (like honey) very carefully when I'm inventing a new recipe; I just use a regular spoon, dollop some honey into the bowl, decide that it looks about the right amount, and move on.