- Today we're making Ginger Apricots Scones.

Let's get started.

(chill music) So to get us started, we need three cups of pastry flour.

I'm using pastry flour because that was in the original Zingerman's Ginger Scone recipe that I've adapted, but you can use all purpose flour as well.

To our flour, we are going to add a tablespoon of baking powder and a teaspoon of kosher salt.

And then we're also adding, and this is just some awesome stuff, you guys, I have made some ginger sugar as well as cardamom sugar that I am adding to our mixture, a half a cup of the ginger sugar, but then two tablespoons I have of the cardamom sugar.

Then I have a teaspoon of ground ginger, just to give it some extra gingery flavor.

We're gonna add that all in here.

(indistinct) There, we get that in.

And now to that, we're gonna add just a little bit of nutmeg and I love just grading nutmeg, just fresh into any sort of faked good.

The smell alone is wonderful.

So now I'm getting that hint of smell from the ginger sugar, from the cardamom sugar, and now with this nutmeg, oh my gosh, it's totally divine and tastes good.

From there, then we now are going to just kind of mix this all up, get it all nice and incorporated here.

We don't want really any lumps of anything in our flour mixture and now here, the next thing is I have chopped up.

This is about half a cup of dried apricots, but again, you could put whatever you would like into your scones.

If you really love that ginger flavor, you could put crystallized ginger all chopped up in there.

You could even probably use fresh ginger a bit in there, whatever you like, but today I have chosen apricots.

And so we're gonna put that all into our flour mixture.

Now, the thing that I like to do before we add anything else, is you know how dried fruit can kind of clump together.

So, I just want to take this and get it kind of mixed up within the flour so it's not all clumped together.

And then when you bite into your scone, you don't have one scone that's filled with dried apricots and another scone that has none of the above.

All right, so we've got that and also clean hands, best tool in the kitchen, to this mixture now we have here a half a cup of butter that I have kind of chopped up into about quarter inch pieces.

And again, using my hands, you can use your fork.

You can use a pastry cutter, but I like to use my fingers and we just wanna get in there and we really want to incorporate the butter into our flour and spice and apricots mixture, and we want the butter to be pea shaped.

So it's good to go ahead and chop it up as finely, as you can, because that will save you some time where you're squashing and trying to incorporate this butter into your flour mixture.

So once you feel like you've got that nicely incorporated in your butter is pea shaped and I can see here that I still have some pieces that are a little bit bigger.

So let me just get those all in nice and evenly.

And now I'm gonna make a well in our flour mixture here.

And then in the well, in the center of the well, I'm going to put one and a half cups of heavy cream.

And I don't think I mentioned that your butter should be cold, your cream should be cold.

You don't want your butter all melty because that's gonna help and just add a light airiness to your scones and that cold cream helps to keep everything just nice and cool, so all I'm doing here is just mixing our heavy cream into our flour mixture.

You want it to get incorporated so that it's gonna end up looking kind of scraggly.

You're not gonna get it fully incorporated at this stage.

So we're just continuing to mix.

And as you can see, it's starting to get kind of scraggly on the ends, but I just wanna get down under and make sure I get as much of that flour, butter mixture as possible.

So when the dough reaches the point where you've got pretty much incorporated looking a little scraggly here, we're gonna take again clean hands.

And we're just going to knead the dough a little bit while it's in, still in the bowl, because we wanna make sure we're getting all of our mixture incorporated as much as we can.

Some of it's still going to be kind of floury, but that's okay because next then, we're going to take the flour.

I have a little extra flour right here, and I'm just going to throw a little flour on our board and I like to use these little silicone mats, 'cause it just helps to keep the dough from sticking a bit while you're kneading it, you can use a little less flour that way.

And then we're dumping out onto our board, getting everything we can, up the dough on our delicious apricots and ginger flavored sugars and everything else and then we're just gonna need this a few times and as I've learned over the years, both hands just kind of take the heels of your hands and try and get the dough incorporated.

Now, you're not gonna get this perfectly incorporated, but you do want it to hold together.

So you kind of scoop it up and we then get it to a point where it looks like it's sticking together pretty well.

And now, some people just take the dough and kind of make it into a circle and do the typical cuts.

The triangular sort of pie shaped cuts per scones.

For me, I prefer just using different shapes.

So today, I'm using the square little fluted cutter, but before, we are ready to cut, we want to take a rolling pin and we want to spread this probably to about three quarters of an inch, maybe a little bit more, depending on how you like the thickness of your scones and just kind of roll it gently out.

I then take it and just kinda even out some of the edges, because what we're gonna do is we're going to cut these out and we can rework the dough once.

But I really want to rework at a whole lot more than that, only because your dough's gonna start getting kind of tough and it's not gonna be a very tasty scone, but I think you guys can see, I mean, you can see the butter in here.

You can see the apricots in here.

I mean, it just makes for a delicious combination.

So I'm gonna take my cutter and I'm gonna start wherever I think I can probably get the best position.

I'm not twisting, I'm just pushing straight down.

And then I am lifting up.

I've got my cookie sheet right here and I've got it covered in parchment.

And I'm just going to gently press my scone out onto the board like that.

Now I'm gonna do probably 12, 13, I think I can get out of this particular dough.

So, here we go.

So now, we cut nine of our scones out and we wanna give them a little egg wash. What I have here is just one whole egg, and I'm just gonna give it a nice little stir and then take my pastry brush and give them a nice little coating of egg wash and what this does is really gives them a nice shine.

Once they're baking, it gives them a nice brown color, which I would think just makes them look nicely finished.

Now, sometimes you might feel in the mood to put a little sugar on top.

I think it would be delicious since we're doing ginger scones to put a little bit of maybe extra ginger sugar on top, if you so desire, but I'm not gonna do that for these because when we get them out of the oven after they cool, we're just gonna put a simple vanilla glaze on top.

So here we have our nine scones now are ready for the oven.

We've preheated our oven to 400 degrees and we're going to keep them in the oven for about 18 minutes, give or take, keep an eye on them, make sure they're not browning too fast.

And then when we're done, we will cool them off.

And ice them up.

So our scones have been out of the oven now for about a half an hour, they're nice and cool.

And now we're going to put the finishing touch on these, which is to make the icing and then drizzle it on.

So let's do that.

What I have here is a cup of confectioner's sugar, to which I am going to add some milk.

I'm only going to put part of the milk in right now because I wanna see what the consistency is before I put too much.

It's much easier to thin something out than it is to make something thicker.

To our icing, I'm going to, this is vanilla bean paste.

I like vanilla bean paste for these types of icings 'cause it gives a nice concentrated amount of vanilla flavor without a lot of extra liquid.

So we're gonna put our bean paste, yeah.

And then with our whisk, just gently start to whisk it up.

And I only say gently, because too many times I have had confectioner's sugar all over me, all over the counter, everywhere where you don't want it to be.

So try to be gentle, some of it's gonna fly out, but oh, well, life is messy.

So you see, I need more, still pretty thick.

That would not be a good consistency for us, for us to ice these, or at least that's not what I'm going for here.

And we continue to mix, I still want it to be just, you can see it's still just a little bit too thick for what I'm looking for so I'm just going to add a tad more of our milk.

Give it a good, good, good stir here.

That's still pretty thick, but I think this will work.

And then what I have here is just an icing bag.

I think it's the easiest way to ice something, especially if you're just zigzagging lines on, but I mean, you don't have to use that.

You can certainly take a knife and spread your icing on.

You can dip your scone into your icing.

You can use a Ziploc bag if you don't have an actual icing bag, so choose your poison so to speak.

But I really just liked these disposable bags, makes my life a lot easier and it's about me.

So here we go.

I've got it in this cup to kind of give it a little structure and that way I can use two hands to kind of get my icing here into the bag, without struggling to hold the bag, get the icing in.

Sometimes it can be quite the juggling act.

So again, just a little tip after years of icing all over the place.

All right, here, we have our icing in the bag.

I just kind of twist the end here.

I have a scissors right here and I don't want thick lines.

So I'm really just gonna take... just a little bit off so I can have some nice thin lines, push my icing through.

And this is kind of the fun part.

You can be as fancy as you want, or as... limited as you want.

It just depends on how you overall want your scones to look.

So just continue on with your icing again.

I mean, you can do a heavier hand, like what I'm doing now will create a little bit of a thicker swirl, a lighter touch.

We'll make it more on the thin side, but I think these scones might just be delicious with a little thicker amount of icing and we're just gonna go across and you can go this way.

You can go that way, you can do an X, you can do a circle and the center.

Be as creative and as fun as you want because that's the whole point of baking anyway, it's just to kind of have fun with it.

Either way it goes, these are gonna be delicious.

So even if you didn't want any icing at all, they would still be fabulous, so here we have it.

Okay, this guy looks a little lonely.

He's a little thin, so I'm just gonna thicken him up a little bit and there you have it guys.

Your finished ginger apricots scones.

I hope you try it, enjoy.

(chill music)