Cranberry Orange Scones with Lingonberry Preserves!

Hello! Hello! So this post has been inspired by the most amazing store on Earth: IKEA!

I was there last Thursday, buying some new furniture, and I also had to get a jar of Lingonberry preserves and some Lingonberry Juice. They have an awesome Swedish food market with a ton of other items (I wish I could afford it all! But I just stuck with my favorites). I then had the dilemma of deciding what to do with the preserves. I wasn't sure if I should use it as an ingredient, or a topping, or make a sandwich, etc. Ultimately I decided to simply put it on top of something, but what? Luckily, Chef Alton Brown came to my rescue with his super simple, amazingly delicious scone recipe! It's basically the same recipe he used to make biscuits in S1 E7 of Good Eats, "The Dough Also Rises", but with a few adaptations. Even though he doesn't actually make the scones, I found watching what he did in the episode very helpful.

Here's the recipe and more photos! 

Here are all of my ingredients!

RECIPE:

• 2 cups flour
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons shortening
• 3/4 cup cream
• 1 egg
• Handful dried currants or dried cranberries

First preheat your oven to 375 ° F, then in a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Mix well. Cut in butter and shortening. I did what Alton Brown does and just used my hands to pinch at the butter and shortening and mix to get this consistency.

You want the dough to look crumbly like this:

 In a separate bowl, combine cream with beaten egg, add to the dry ingredients. Then stir in fruit.

I used Orange Flavored Dried Cranberries from Trader Joe's. I was worried about the scones being bland, but there was so much great orange flavor permeating throughout each one! And then the cranberries themselves (especially the ones that were exposed) had a taste and texture like they were candied. I would definitely, highly recommend these to everyone who ever needs dried fruit to bake with.

The  resulting dough should come out nice and sticky!

Turn dough out onto a floured surface. Roll dough out and cut into biscuit size rounds.

Like this!

And this!

Bake for 15 minutes or until brown.

This is where I ran into a bit of trouble: my oven, that was supposedly preheating all this time, was stone cold when I went to put this scones in. So I thought a moment and decided, in the words of Tim Gunn, I was going to "Make it work!" :) 

And into the toaster oven they go!

I can't even begin to give you an accurate cooking time. I turned the little oven up as high as it could go (somewhere around 475F) and baked each little batch for . . . I don't even know. Probably 40 mins. Rotating the tray and rearranging them often. I was worried they would come out disgustingly dry, but the resilient little things managed to deal with this obscene length of time in the toaster very well, and they were crumbly and delicious!

Even though the recipe says it yields a dozen, I got 16 scones in all!

And here is the jar that inspired me to create this delicious, sconey vessel for it's contents:

Add a Lingonberry Juice Box and there you have the perfect breakfast!

Thanks so much for reading!

- Christine Frankenstein