Showing posts sorted by date for query Scones. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query Scones. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Usually at the weekend I like to bake us something that we can enjoy for breakfast or with a hot drink. I do bake sweet things too.
I am not sure why I always bake at the weekend. I suppose it is a habit that started when I was working full time. I did not really have much time during the week to bake us anything special. We were lucky I managed to get dinner done!
The recipe I am sharing with you today for Sugar-Free Banana Nut Muffins has been adapted from a cookbook of mine entitled Bread for Breakfast by Beth Hensperger.
It is filled with lots of baked Breakfast options, including muffins, loaves (both sweet and savoury, quick and yeasted), Scones, Biscuits, cornbreads, etc.
There are also a sections on coffee cakes and holiday bakes, pancakes and waffles, as well as butters, jams and fruit and cheese spreads.
Its not an overly large book, but it is filled with quite a few goodies. Old fashioned as well as the new. Its one of my favourite breakfast baking books.
I was intrigued by this Banana Muffin recipe because it was sugar free. These days we have all been brainwashed by popular coffee spots and warehouse stores into think that a muffin is supposed to a small cake. Similar to a cupcake but without frosting!
As a consequence, our tastebuds have come to expect that every muffin we eat should be stogged full of sugar in one form or another. Ultra sweet, containing candy like chocolate chips and the like.
Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a chocolate chip muffin. I adore them myself. But a muffin should be a muffin and not a little cake. Know what I mean.
This muffin recipe boasts no sugar at all. Nada. Zip. Zero sugar. Instead it relies upon the sweetness of the fruit to bring sweet into the mix. In this case bananas.
Bananas are quite sweet fruit and the longer you allow them to ripen the sweeter they get. The best bananas for baking are ones which are heavily speckled with brown, maybe even to the point where you think they are past it.
But they are not past it. They are perfect and sweet and ready to be baked into muffins and loaves, cookies, cakes, etc.
These are lovely and moist. There is buttermilk in the batter. I love bakes with buttermilk. Buttermilk adds a special lightness and tenderness to bakes such as this.
It is an acid as well, so it helps to create a nice lift. You always need to add bicarbonate of soda to a bake using something acidic like buttermilk, yogurt, sour cream, etc.
When baking soda is combined with the lactic acids of buttermilk, the acid neutralizes the metallic taste of sodium carbonate, and the batter will bubble and expand.
This is why when you are baking something with buttermilk and soda in it you need to get your bake into the oven as quickly as possible. This is to help take advantage of that chemical reaction.
The heat of the oven will immediately increase the effects of that action giving you a nice tall and light bake. If you wait too long to put your bakes into the oven you will risk losing that effect, and in fact you will decrease the action of the buttermilk and the soda as well.
So speed is the key factor here. Make sure you have your pan greased and everything ready to go as soon as you mix the wet and dry ingredients together!
So, no sugar. These muffins have no sugar whatsoever. I didn't mind. The end result was not sweet at all actually. It was just right. Just what I would expect a true muffin to taste like.
If you want sweet, you will have to add a bit of sugar into the mix. I wouldn't think you would need a lot actually, maybe only 1 or 2 TBS of either caster sugar or soft light brown sugar.
We enjoyed them just as they were, served warm with some butter for spreading on top. Look at the texture of these beauties. I call that perfection.
The recipe only makes 9 muffins. That's another thing I liked about the recipe. Nine muffins is a perfectly reasonable amount. They also freeze really well according to the recipe. Up to three months in an airtight container.
Baking things like this at the weekend means I also get to use my roll cover. My good friend Monique sent this sweet embroidered roll cover to me last year, or possibly even the year before, for my Birthday.
Every time I use it I cannot help but think of her, and her many kindnesses to me through the years. Meeting good and kind people is one of the blessings you gain from being a member of the blogging community.
Like is attracted to like. These sweet friendships are one of the things I love most about blogging. That sense of community. Oh sure there is the odd nasty person, or troll as they are called, but the good ones far outweigh them.
There are some pecans in these muffins. Chopped pecans. I always like to toast my nuts before baking with them. It doesn't take much of an effort. It only takes a few minutes on a dry baking sheet in a hot oven.
They are done when they start to smell all nice and nutty. Do watch them however, as they can go from toasty to burnt in milliseconds. Five to eight minutes at 200*C/400*F will do the trick.
You could add chocolate chips. Just saying. I like semi-sweet chocolate chips or milk chocolate chips. Both are quite nice in banana muffins. You could even add some berries. Blueberries would be nice.
If you rely on the sweetness of your muffin to come from the sweetness of the banana you really don't have to feel guilty about spreading them with butter while hot, and maybe even drizzling them with a bit of honey if you can tolerate honey.
As a diabetic, honey sends my sugar levels sky-rocketing. Even just a little bit on the tip of my tongue. Its a shame really because I have always loved honey.
Anyways, if you are looking for a nice, moist and not overly sweet muffin, with plenty of toasty nut crunch, then you have come to the right place! These fit the bill on all counts!
Sugar-Free Banana Nut Muffins
Yield: Makes 9 Muffins
prep time: 10 Mincook time: 25 Mininactive time: 5 Mintotal time: 40 Min
This is an interesting muffin adapted from a cookery book by Beth Henshberger entitled Bread for Breakfast. This is a lovely moist muffin that truly is not too sweet, relying only on the sweetness of the banana. I think this is what muffins were originally intended to be. Breads and not Cake.
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups (210g) plain flour
- 1/2 cup (70g)whole wheat flour
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/2 cup (60g) chopped toasted pecan nuts
- 1 cup (240ml) buttermilk
- 2 large free range eggs
- 120ml (1/2 cup) canola oil
- 2 medium sized ripe bananas
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
Instructions:
- Preheat the oven to 190*C/375*F/ gas mark 5. Butter a muffin tin really well, or spray with non-stick cooking spray.
- Sift together the flour, baking powder, soda and cinnamon. Stir in the salt. Stir in the toasted pecans.
- Beat the oil, eggs, buttermilk and vanilla together with a wire wisk to combine well. Stir in the mashed banana. Pour this mixture into the dry ingrdients and fold everything together with a plastic spatula just to combine.
- Immediately spoon into the prepared muffin tin, filling each hole to the rim.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes. The muffins should be well risen and a toothpick inserted in the centre of one should come out clean.
- Let cool in the pan for about 5 minutes before tipping out onto a wire rack to cool.
notes:
Do not allow these to overbake. I would definitely check them at 20 minutes. If you must you can add 2 TBS of brown sugar to the wet ingredients to add a bit more sweetness. Any leftovers can be stored in an air tight container, or frozen for up to 3 months.
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I am of the strongest opinion that one can never have such a thing as too many biscuit recipes, and by biscuit I am talking North American Biscuits, not English Biscuits, which are cookies and something completely different.
Cheddar, Bacon & Chive Biscuits are fabulously tasty, light, flakey, peppery, stogged with rich strong cheddar and are beautiful served along side of savoury things like soups, stews, salads, etc.
I will go out on a limb here and tell you they are also kinda nice spread with butter and honey, only because I have done that and they were delicious, but then again, taste is a very individual thing is it not?
I had this huge discussion on my English Kitchen Facebook stage the other day with someone who was quite irate that in an English Kitchen I would be calling Scones Biscuits. I was calling what I had made Biscuits (The Yogurt ones) because they were Biscuits, NOT Scones!
I, personally, know the difference between a Biscuit and a Scone. I am well versed in the differences between the two. I am a trained Chef good golly cheese whiz. I have had experience living and cooking on both sides of the pond.
Today I will endeavour to enlighten you with what those differences are. What you do with this knowledge is up to you. 😊 I know, I am preaching to the choir here, but there may be some who don't know and this is for them.
When it comes to mixing biscuits and scones, the methods used are pretty much indistinguishable. Both require flour and some leavening usually in the way of baking powder.
Biscuits sometimes also have baking soda in them, especially if they are using buttermilk (such as these tasty ones I am sharing with you today.)
If you are using something acidic like buttermilk or sour cream, yogurt, etc. you need a bit of soda. The soda reacts with the acid in the liquid to give you plenty of lift.
Both use some sort of fat which helps to create air pockets in them when they are baking which leads to flakiness.
With biscuits this will be vegetable shortening, lard, and sometimes butter or a combination of those things.
With scones, it is always butter, and there is always a lot more of it than you would find being used in a biscuit batter.
Biscuits for the most part contain no sugar, although you will find the rare recipe which will include at least some. My mother-in-laws recipe has a TBS of sugar in it.
Generally speaking a scone recipe will have some sugar in it, maybe even copious amounts.
Biscuits are usually brushed with butter or milk. Scones usually have an egg wash. Scones, generally speaking, will also have he addition of eggs in the liquid used. (Not always however.) Are you confused yet?
Biscuits are soft and light and flakey in texture and most often will be savoury rather than sweet. Meant to be eaten along with soups, or stews, or salads, or filled with things like ham and eggs. Breakfast biscuits are quite popular.
You will find them filled with bacon, ham or sausage and eggs and cheese at mny fast food places in North America.
Quite often you will see them split and served with sausage gravy ladled over top or creamed fish or chicken.
There is one exception to this rule and that is in the case of fruit shortcakes, whereupon they will be split and filled with mashed fruit of some kind and icecream or whipped cream.
Scones are a bit more crumbly wih a much shorter texture than Biscuits and a lot sweeter. More often than not, they are served cold and meant
to be spread with butter, jam, conserves, fruit and cream and enjoyed
with copious amounts of hot tea.
Quite often you will find that they contain fruit, either dried or fresh. And even so they will still be served cold with jam and cream. As a rule scones are never served hot or even warm.
Biscuits can have mix-ins, such as these ones today, but generally speaking the mix ins will be of the savoury variety. I have never seen a Biscuit with anything sweet added such as dried fruit or even fresh fruit.
Mix-ins are usually things like bacon, or minced ham, cheese, onions, chives, etc. pretty much always savoury, although there may be some exceptions to the rule I haven't come across!
There are some really strong basic differences between the two as well as a lot of similarities, specifically the main one being in how they are put together/mixed. But even that is not 100% standard some of the time.
Any how, I just wanted to clear the air a bit as to some of the differences between the two things. This recipe I am sharing with you today is for BISCUITS! Yay!!
And what wonderful biscuits they are. They are nice and light and flaky and filled with all sorts of lovely savoury moreish bits.
Crisp smoky bacon, sharp cheddar cheese, herby fresh chives and plenty of garlic and black pepper. They are moist and light from the use of buttermilk.
Instead of the usual shortening or lard, butter is grated into them as the fat. You will want to freeze it as it is really important that you keep the butter as cold as possible.
Usually fat will be cut into biscuits using a pastry blender or two round bladed knives (as opposed to being rubbed in with a scone.) Today it is grated in and then just stirred in with a knife.
All your flour and savoury bits are stirred together and then the butter is dropped in and then you stir in buttermilk. If you don't have buttermilk, don't worry you can make the equivalent using lemon juice with full fat milk added to the same amount needed as buttermilk.
If you mix the two together, you just need to let it sit for about five minutes so that the milk will clabber. I usually end up having to do this as I have had a very difficult time getting buttermilk lately.
Just look at how nice and flaky those biscuits are and how filled with lovely tasty bits. That cheese, that bacon, the chives. So yummy!
They are delicious split and spread with cold butter. I enjoyed them with a cup of hot soup for a delicious lunch.
Oh and in all of my talking about the differences between scones and biscuits I forgot to tell you that this was another small batch recipe.
You could double it of course if you wished and they will absolutely freeze beautifully if tightly wrapped, for up to three months. Simply thaw in a microwave on high for about 30 seconds. Enjoy!
Cheddar, Bacon & Chive Biscuits
Yield: 8 Biscuits
prep time: 15 Mcook time: 15 Mtotal time: 30 M
This is a small batch recipe. These biscuits are incredibly flaky, tall and nice and buttery. Filled with lots of sharp cheddar, crisp bacon bits and fresh chives they make an excellent addition to the lunch or supper table!
Ingredients:
- 2 cups (280g) plain flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp coarse black pepper
- 1 tsp garlic powder (NOT garlic salt)
- 3 slices of crisp cooked bacon, crumbled into bits
- 60g sharp cheddar cheese grated
- 1 TBS finely chopped chives.
- 3 ounces (85g) frozen butter (6 TBS)
- 7 fluid ounces (190ml)of buttermilk
Instructions:
- Preheat the oven to 225*C/425*F/gas mark 7. Line a baking tray with some baking paper and set aside.
- Sift the flour, baking powder and baking soda into a bowl. Stir in the cheese, chopped chives, bacon, pepper, garlic powder, and salt.
- Using the largest holes on a box grater, quickly grate the butter over top and mix in using a round bladed knife. Stir all together. Add the buttermilk and mix together. The dough will be somewhat sticky. Don't worry about that.
- Tip the dough out onto a floured board and knead lightly 3 or 4 times to bring it together. Pat out to a 1 1/2 inch thick round.
- Using a 2 1/2 to 3- inch sharp round cutter, stamp out rounds, using a straight up and down motion. Do not twist the cutter.
- Place spaced apart on the baking sheet.
- Bake for about 15 minutes until risen and golden brown. Serve warm with plenty of butter for spreading. Delicious!
Thanks so much for visiting. Do come again!
I adore Biscuits, and by that I don't mean cookies, I mean North American style biscuits. Any soup or stew is immeasurably improved by the addition to the table of a nice basket of hot fresh biscuits.
I often have huge debates over the differences between Biscuits and Scones. Some people think that the two are the same thing and interchangeable, but in all honesty, they are two completely different things altogether!
There are some really significant differences between scones and biscuits. Scones typically have eggs in them and biscuits do not. Scones tend to be a little denser, drier, and not as flaky.
Just adding oats, fruit, herbs or anything else to a biscuit dough and cutting them in triangles does NOT make them a scone. Seriously. They may look identical in very many ways, but that is where any similarity stops!
The recipe I am sharing today for Yogurt Biscuits was adapted from the
Book, "Southern Biscuits," by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart.
I was intrigued by the notion that you could make delicious biscuits with only flour, salt and yogurt. I just had to try them for myself.
They were incredibly easy to put together. They are basically just salt, self rising flour and yogurt. Do use full fat yogurt. I have it on the authority of Natalie that low fat yogurt does not work well. I believe her.
I did not try them with low fat yogurt, but when a professional tells you not to use it. I listen. They usually know what they are talking about. Trust me on this.
If you don't have self
raising flour, you can make your own. (For every cup of flour, sift
together 1 cup of flour, 1/2 tsp salt and 1 1/2 tsp of baking powder.) It
works a charm.
If I am making my own self raising flour, I will usually make five or six cups of it at a time. You will always use it up. I promise you it won't be a waste of your time or money. I have plenty of recipes on here that use self-raising flour.
Soft butter goes very well with hot biscuits and if you are serving biscuits on their own, why not make it a flavoured butter. Today I made Honey Cardamom Butter. Honey and Cardamom have a natural affinity for each other.
Both have incredible warmth. Its difficult to put into words, but both feel like hugs and kisses and home sweet home to me.
This natural affinity between honey and cardamom is almost as strong as the one for biscuits and any butter! What is a biscuit without butter? No quite the same.
Look at the height of these biscuits. These rise really, really high. Quite surprisingly high when you consider that there is only a few basic ingredients in them.
That's what you get when you use a very light touch and you don't twist the cutter when you are cutting. So many people end up with lopsided biscuits.
That can be prevented by cutting them out by tapping straight up and down with a sharp edged cutter. Straight up. Straight down. No twisting at all.
I used a 3 inch cutter, patting my dough out to 1-inch thickness. I got 8 lovely big biscuits. Eight big, lovely, fluffy, beautifully textured biscuits.
These are as light as a cloud. They almost float off the plate. Like an angel's wings or an angel's kiss. They are amazing.
If you use a 2 inch cutter you will get more biscuits obviously. I like my biscuits to be a bit of a handful most of the time. They are perfect for filling with things.
Smaller ones also have their uses however. Smaller ones are perfect for grouping on a plate and can trick people into thinking they are not quite eating as much as they would be were the biscuits larger in size.
You can cut biscuits rally small, like one inch in diameter and that size is perfect to be used filled with ham or smoked salmon as appetizers or pre-meal nibbles, meant to be served with drinks
These, however, were perfect just as they are . . . tall and light textured . . . with a beautifully flaky crumb. Mean to be enjoyed.
In short . . . biscuit perfection. Whether you are enjoying them with butter and something sweet, or sitting next to a hot bowl of soup or stew.
Obviously with a soup or stew you may want to leave off the Cardamom Butter, unless it is a creamy soup such as a roasted butternut squash or pumpkin. It might go rather well with those.
In any case, I really hope you will want to bake these. I am absolutely positive that you will enjoy them as much as we did.
Yogurt Biscuits & Honey Cardamom Butter
Yield: 6 - 8 (3-inch) biscuits)
prep time: 15 Mcook time: 15 Mtotal time: 30 M
Make sure you use full fat yogurt for these deliciously light and fluffy biscuits. If your yogurt is especially thick you can thin it with a bit of milk. These are fabulously tall, crisp on the outsides, tender inside, and go perfectly with the honey butter!
Ingredients:
For the Honey Cardamom Butter:
- 1/2 cup butter at room temperature (120g)
- 2 TBS honey
- 1 1/2 TBS icing sugar
- 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
For the Biscuits:
- 2 1/4 cups of self raising flour (315g)
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 cup full fat yogurt (245g)
- softened butter for brushing (optional)
Instructions:
- To make the honey cardamom butter, beat all of the ingredients together in a bowl until evenly mixed. Scrape into a serving bowl. Cover and chill until needed.
- Preheat the oven to 225*C/450*F/ gas mark 7. Line a baking tray with baking paper.
- Measure (280g) 2 cups of the the flour into a bowl along with the salt and make a well in the centre. Add two thirds of the yogurt into the well, reserving the rest along with the remaining (35g)1/4 cup of flour. Use a spatula to mix the flour and yogurt together just until he mixture comes together and the dry ingredients are moisened and a sticky dough begins to pull away from the sides of the bowl. If you think the dough is too dry, add the remaining yogurt. If your dough is too wet, use more flour when shaping.
- Lightly sprinkle a board with some of the reserved flour. Turn the dough out and using floured hands, fold the dough in half and pat out to a 1/2-inch thick round using only as much flour as is needed. Flour again and repeat, patting the dough out to 1/2 inch thick for a normal biscuit, and 1 inch thick for a tall biscuit. (I like them tall.)
- Using a floured 3-inch cutter stamp out 8 biscuits. Take care not to twist the cutter or your biscuits will be lopsided. Try to get as many cuts as you can from the first cutting. Gather, pat out and recut the scraps. (These will be tougher which is why you want to get as many as you can from the first patting out.)
- Transfer all the biscuits to the lined baking tray.
- Bake the biscuits on the top rack of the oven for 6 minutes. Rotate the baking pan, back to front and then bake for a further 4 to 8 minutes until well risen and golden brown.
- Brush the tops with softened butter if desired. Serve warm with the Honey Cardamom Butter.
This content (written and photography) is the sole property of The
English Kitchen. Any reposting or misuse is not permitted. If you are
reading this elsewhere, please know that it is stolen content and you
may report it to me at: theenglishkitchen@mail.com
Thank you for visiting! Do come again!
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