I have always loved Starbucks’ pumpkin scones. Sadly Starbucks in Quebec are not actually owned by Starbucks corporation so they don’t sell the same pastries, hence no pumpkin scones for me. I poked around the internet to find a copycat recipe to try to fulfill my craving and I ended up modifying one to fit my tastes. The one I started off with is here (scroll down to the very bottom of the page and it is in the last post).
I started off with white flour, whole wheat flour, flax seeds, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and dried ginger. I added quite a lot of the spices since I like a pronounced spicy taste. This of course, got mixed up and put to the side as it waited for the rest of the ingredients to join the party.
An egg, heavy cream and pumpkin puree. The original recipe calls for half and half which I have never seen in a supermarket. Is it purely an American thing? Anyone know?
Everything combined together to create a nice shade of orange.
I loathe cutting butter in by hand. I know the results are better but I usually end up doing it in the food processor. Alas, it was dirty and in the dishwasher so after much grumbling I went to try to find where I had stashed the pastry blender since it had been so long since I had last used it.
Here is my butter, all cut in, in nice pea sized pieces just like the cookbooks tell you to do.
I mixed in the wet ingredients but it wasn’t coming together properly. I added more cream and pumpkin puree until it was the right texture.
I have one small working surface in my kitchen so if I can avoid having to roll out baked goods I do so. If you prefer pretty uniform sized scones please feel free to roll them out, if you’re pressed for time and not as particular about aesthetics as me, use an ice cream scoop. After I had made the scones I dipped my fingers in flour to be able to smooth out the tops, which is why you can see traces of flour on top of them. These then went in the oven.
In the original recipe there are two kinds of icing, since I was short of icing sugar I just made one. I honestly never bother measuring anything when making a glaze type of icing. You really don’t need to, all you accomplish is getting your measuring cups dirty. I used all the icing sugar that I had left along with cinnamon and nutmeg. I had already used a lot of the spices in the scones so I didn’t want too much of a strong spice taste in the icing.
I like to leave my glaze fairly thick and put it on my baked goods while they are still warm. That way the heat helps the glaze coat the scones. If you make the icing too thin it will just drip off and end up on the plate.
If you’ve ever had a Starbucks scone you will see that mine are a lot darker, mostly due to the fact that I doubled the spices and used half whole wheat flour. I love scones of all kinds, from fluffy to dense they are all good to me. Except dry scones, that I just cannot forgive. Or scones that use margarine instead of butter, that is just blasphemy. I digress, anyways these scones were really filling, a perfect balance between sweet and spice. One plus of denser scones is that they transport better than fluffy ones, I brought them to work as snacks during the week and they arrived in one piece everyday.
