Strawberry Scones

2 ¼ c. all-purpose flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

¼ c. sugar

½ tsp salt

6 Tbsp cold butter

1 cup strawberries, chopped small

¾ cup milk (or half and half) (may need to add a little more)

turbinado sugar (optional)

425 F

greased baking sheet

11-13 minutes

Mix flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Cut butter into the flour mixture. Toss berries to coat with flour, then add the milk and stir until just combined. Drop onto the baking sheet and sprinkle with turbinado sugar before baking. Makes about 8.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to make another recipe that calls for strawberries. Last week we talked about strawberry shortcake, which included how to cut up and sugar your strawberries. But sometimes you have strawberries left over after you eat up all of your shortcake. You notice them in the fridge, lonely and unloved, getting kind of gross and wilted. Can they be saved?

Of course they can! Turn them into strawberry scones. Look, I just ate four of these and the recipe typically only makes eight so believe me, they’re good. Especially with coffee.

You can use sugared strawberries that are left over from another recipe or that you aren’t sure what to do with, or you can prepare the strawberries specially for this recipe. You don’t even need to sugar them, just cut them up.

You will only need one bowl and one baking sheet. Grease the baking sheet. I usually use Crisco but it doesn’t really matter what you use for this recipe.

In the bowl, mix up the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar with a fork or whisk. If you’re not sure how to measure flour properly, check out our first episode, about chocolate chip cookies.

Then you’ll cut the butter up into the flour mixture until all the butter is in little tiny pieces and each piece is coated with flour. You do this the same way you did it in the strawberry shortcake episode. The pieces don’t have to be infinitesimal, by the way. Just make them reasonably small, like little peas, although if you have the time and patience to really make them small, you’ll get a better result. The goal of cutting butter into dry ingredients is to end up with lots of tiny pieces of butter all coated with flour.

Before you start cutting in the butter is a good time to turn the oven on to preheat.

Strawberries contain a lot of liquid. If they’ve been cut up and sitting in a bowl in the fridge for a day or two, a lot of that liquid has pooled at the bottom. Put the cut up berries into a measuring cup, then hold the berries in the cup with your fingers while you turn the cup over. Let any moisture you picked up by accident drip out. Then add the berries to the flour mixture and give them a few good stirs to coat them with flour.

Finally, add the milk. I don’t remember where I got this recipe, but it originally called for a full cup of cream or half and half. You are probably not going to need this much. I start with three-quarters of a cup of milk, usually 2% unless I bought whole milk by accident. Pour this in and mix it around until there’s no dry flour left. If there’s a lot of flour left after all the milk is absorbed, you can add a little more milk, but be cautious. You really don’t want this dough to get too soupy. It should be bouncy and sticky, not smooth and drippy.

Don’t try to make the batter smooth. It won’t happen, for one thing, and for another, time is of the essence now. You want to get this dough in the oven before it loses some of its oomph.

You don’t roll these scones out. Just get a spoon, large or small, doesn’t matter, and scoop great big lumps of dough onto the greased baking sheet. Make these big and roughly all about the same size. I usually get eight big blobs out of the dough onto one baking sheet.

If you have turbinado sugar—you know, big sugar crystals that some people l