Item number two in my Cozy Basket? Yeahhhhhh, that would be these moist and flaky scones. Anything served with tea just seems like a cozy choice, so they were a natural fit. Plus, we know I wouldn’t be representin’ with these if they weren’t stellar.
Full disclosure: I’m not typically a scone lover. I find them to be dry, bland and just all-around inferior to their fluffy, glory-hogging muffin and biscuit cousins. That is…until I found these.
Tucked away within the pages of Molly Gilbert’s mind-blowing, sure-to-become-a-classic Sheet Pan Suppers, is this little gem of a scone recipe. Not only are these packin’ some blueberries (which alone earns them an automatic free pass to my mouth), they’re also studded with creamy little pockets of white chocolate and topped with a delightfully crunchy turbinado-sugar crust – a perfect contrast to the supremely soft crumb that lay hidden beneath. I have died and gone to scone heaven. Cook’s note: the original recipe calls for raspberries, but I’m a fan of using what I have on-hand…which was (and allllllways is) blueberries. Point being: any type of berries will work.
Pop open one o’ these puppies and give it a little smear of fresh butter (or curd if you really wanna get authentic). If you’re giving them away as gifts like I am (if I can wrestle the last few from my 3-year-old’s kung-fu grip), you can freeze them baked until the night before you plan to get your gifting on, or unbaked until you’re ready to bake up a batch. Gifter’s choice.
Either way, this is one homemade gift that will not share that annual fruitcake’s lonely fate. These will be gone within seconds and remembered for years to come.
Print Recipe
Blueberry + White Chocolate Scones
Yet another winner from Molly Gilbert's Sheet Pan Suppers, these are literally the BEST scones I have ever tasted...and that's saying a lot. Like hands down. No contest. The contest is over, and these scones are the winners. Period. End of discussion. These are soft and tender and moist with none of the typical dryness that usually makes me choose muffins over scones. Make some. Now.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees with a rack in the center position.
Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.
Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large mixing bowl. Add the butter cubes and use your fingertips to work it into the flour until it's moistened and resembles small pebbles. (For this step, I just put the flour mixture into a food processor, add the butter cubes and pulse until it looks like pebbles, instead of mixing by hand. Then I put into a large mixing bowl.)
Gently stir in the white chocolate chips.
In a 2-cup measuring cup, whisk together the half-and-half, lemon juice, egg yolk and vanilla, and pour over the flour mixture. Stir with a fork just until everything comes together to form a shaggy dough.
Dump the dough out onto a floured work surface (I use a big sheet of parchment paper) and gently pat it into a 12-by-14-inch slab that's about 1/2-inch thick. Scatter the berries over the dough, fold the dough in half over itself to trap the berries inside, then gently knead once to make sure the dough is sealed.
Shape into a 10-inch circle (about 3/4-inch thick), then use a biscuit cutter to cut out 8 - 12 scones, depending on the size of your cutter. Gently reshape the dough each time you run out of cutting space to maximize your scones.
Place the scones on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper, then brush the tops with half-and-half (I mix a little drizzlet of vanilla bean paste into the half-and-half too) and sprinkle with the turbinado sugar. Bake until golden, 15 - 20 minutes.
