Okay.  I woke up at 6am yesterday morning to work out at my gym with all the early-rising over-achieving fitness gurus.  The crowd at 6am is seriously more attractive and more fit than that at 7.  Maybe 6am is for the true gym dedicatees?  I don’t know.

 I dragged myself gymwards that early because:

  1. I had to drive to the dealership for an estimate before work.  My brand new car, Hedwig, was assaulted by a Mercedes last weekend and lost her driver’s side mirror.  (The Merc is paying, so no worries).
  2. I have had to go to various collision centers and meetings (strrrrrrrike!) in the wee small hours every morning this week, so the gym has dropped significantly on my priority list.
  3. I planned to revisit my manchego/fig/pecan scones last night!

Experiment #1B: Manchego / Fig / Pecan again.

manchego1.jpgfigs2.jpgpecans.jpg 

 Besides resulting in spilt flour all over our laundry room floor, this experiment turned out well, if I do say so myself. 

The recipe I’ve been tweaking is for sweet blueberry scones.  Last time I made these manchego/fig scones, my only deviation from the recipe was not adding sugar.  This time, I left out sugar, doubled the salt, and added ground black pepper to make the batter more savory.  It worked.   Whereas the previous result was a little bland (though moist and airy), this result had a little more oomph that set off the cheese, fig, nut combo.

Another difference between Monday night’s figgy scones and the ones last night was I upped my fig : cheese & nut ratio.  Before, when I rolled out the batter in preparation for filling, I spaced out some fig slices evenly over the dough.  This time, however, I covered the dough in a dense layer of fig, then a layer of cheese, and then a layer of nuts.  While this method did not help my over-stuffing problem (see last post), it left me with a very tasty scone.  The flavors in this scone were much better balanced, I think as a result of both the tweaked batter and the upped fig proportions.

Did I tell you how this recipe calls for grated, frozen butter?  Odd-sounding, but it does.  So that’s another difference: Last time, I had just bought my butter before throwing it in the freezer for an hour; this time, it had been sitting in the freezer for several days.  I’m not sure what difference this made to the fully-cooked scone, but it made a big difference to my numbing hands as I painstaking grated the frozen butter.  This is by far my least favorite part of preparing scones.

A positive difference was that this time I got to use my new rolling pin.  It was lovely and helped me to roll out my dough more thinly, thus better enabling the stuffed logroll part of the recipe.  The rolling pin was an all around better tool than what I had been using before.  While a wine bottle actually makes a very good rolling pin, rolling it in dough makes for a very messy wine bottle.

Finally, I divvied up this batch of scones into eight pieces, as the recipe tells me to do, rather than sixteen.  Okay, okay.  The recipe writers knew what they were talking about.  While some of the scones did slide and ooze a bit (probably because they were stuffed to the gills with savory deliciousness), they generally maintained their shape. 

So here they are in all their glory:

fig-scone.jpg

They really were tasty.  And I’ve managed to limit myself to just one.  I brought them to work in hopes of bribing my colleagues to do my work so I can blog all morning.  Success!

Oh, and here is Hedwig’s poor side mirror:

poor-hedwig.jpg