Tag Archives: cream tea

21/05/2025 · 6:00 am

Four Scone Recipes

You know what it’s like; you go to the home baking aisle of the supermarket and pick up a bag of flour, thinking ‘I’m sure I’m running low’, buy a bag, only to find there is, in fact, a large bag sitting, unopened, in the pantry. Unsure what to do with them, I asked social media whether I should make some scones, saffron buns or lardy cake with it (three recipes I have been meaning to post for years now). The answer came in: 3-way tie. I shall endeavour to do all three for you over the next month or so.

Up first, then, are scones, the must-have for a modern Cornish or Devonshire cream tea. I have written about cream teas both on the blog and in my book Knead to Know, the excerpt of which you can find on my YouTube Channel.

This is the recipe I used when I had both my restaurant and artisan market stall, so it is very tried-and-tested. I have provided some variations for you beneath the method: cranberry and orange, cheese, and walnut and Stilton. When the restaurant was open, we served a savoury cream tea using a cheese scone, swapped clotted cream for cream cheese and exchanged the jam for curried beetroot chutney or onion marmalade.

Classic recipes – especially Scottish and Irish ones – use buttermilk instead of plain milk. As buttermilk is increasingly difficult to get hold of these days, I’ve used milk, but you can swap the two. If you do, use 15 g bicarbonate of soda instead of 25 g baking powder. One final thing: I use strong white flour instead of plain to give the scones a boost in the oven, again, not traditional; in fact, it was a trick picked up from Paul Hollywood in his book 100 Great Breads. This doesn’t mean you can knead the dough roughly as though it is for bread; you still have to use a light touch with mixing, rolling and cutting out. Hopefully, my method will help you achieve great results.

I’ll follow soon with a post on the history of scones.

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Basic Scones

A note on measuring liquids: 1 ml of milk weighs 1 g, so it’s easier – and much more accurate – to weigh it on scales rather than reading the graduations on the side of the measuring jug.

Makes 12 to 15 scones.

500 g strong white flour, plus extra for dusting

30g baking powder

½ tsp salt

75g butter

75g caster sugar

80g quartered glacé cherries, raisins or currants (optional)

200 ml/g whole milk

2 medium eggs

Egg wash: 1 egg or egg yolk beaten with ½ tsp salt

Granulated or Demerara sugar for sprinkling

Preheat your oven to 200°C.

In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt and rub in the butter – you can use the flat beater attachment on your mixer with this, or good old fingertips. Stir in the sugar and fruit (if using).

Beat the eggs with the milk, and steadily mix the liquids into the dry ingredients. If using a mixer, keep it at a slow speed. Make sure all the flour is incorporated, bring the dough together and give it a brief knead on a floured worktop until the dough is smooth.

Keeping your worktop floured, roll out the dough to a thickness of 1.5 to 1.75 cm (a generous ½ inch), and cut out into rounds. I normally use a cutter of a diameter between 7 and 8 cm. It is important to take care when cutting: make sure you dunk your cutter in more flour and tap off excess before cutting. This is important because if there are splodges of sticky dough on the cutter, it will seal the edges of the scones, preventing a good rise. Also, don’t be tempted to twist your cutter, as this will have a similar effect. Arrange the cut-out scones on 2 lined baking sheets.

Bring the leftover dough together with your hands to form a cohesive dough without kneading it too much – we don’t want tough scones! Roll out again and cut out. Repeat until all of the mixture is used up.

Brush with egg wash being careful not to let any dribble down the sides – again, this will hamper the rising of the dough – then sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown and well risen. If there is uneven browning at the 10-minute mark, switch the trays around in the oven.

Cool on a rack.

Scones are best enjoyed on the day or the day after they are made. They do freeze well. Enliven them by popping them in the microwave for 10 to 20 seconds.

Eat with butter or clotted cream and jam.

Variations

Cranberry and Orange

Make as above, but add the zest of two oranges to the dry ingredients, and use dried cranberries instead of raisins or currants. Juice the oranges, pour into a measuring jug and top up with milk to 200ml/g.

Classic cheese scones

Use just 25 g caster sugar, and add 100 to 125 g grated Cheddar cheese once the flour has been rubbed in. If you like, you can add ½ teaspoon of dried herbs and a good pinch of Cayenne pepper. Use 230 g/ml of milk instead of 200 g/ml. Sprinkle some finely grated cheese (Parmesan is good) over the egg-washed scones before they go in the oven.

Walnut and Stilton scones

As above, but use 100-125 g grated Stilton and 80 g chopped walnuts

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19/10/2019 · 6:22 pm

Cornish Splits (& More on Cream Teas)

Cornish splits are soft and pillowy enriched bread rolls and were the original cakey element of the Cornish cream tea. Bread rolls such as these were – and indeed are– eaten all around the country. There were Devonshire chudleighs, Yorkshire cakes and Guernsey biscuits, for example. But it was the people of Devon and Cornwall who combined them with clotted cream and jam.

These light, fluffy rolls are enriched with butter and are made extra soft by being made with milk rather than water and are covered with a tea towel as soon as they come out of the oven – the captured steam softening the exterior crust. Once cooled – or better, just warm – the rolls are not cut open, but split open with the fingers, hence their name.

Of course, the cream tea as we know today it is made up a scone, clotted cream and jam. Some places sell them made with whipped cream, but that will not do. The phrase ‘cream tea’ meaning a scone/split with jam and cream (as opposed to tea with cream in) seems to be relatively modern – the earliest printed reference of one coming from a 1932 article in The Cornishman newspaper (see foodsofengland.com). The earliest mention of a combination of jam, cream and bread eaten together pops up in the Devon town Tavistock’s accounts dating from the tenth century!

Cutting from The Cornishman, Thursday 3rd September 1931 (foodsofengland.com)

Some establishments in Cornwall still serve a split instead of a scone in their cream teas, but they are few and far between. Many folk reckon that the split is superior to the scone in a cream tea, the scone winning out by virtue of it being much quicker and easier to make. The Devonians apparently turned to scones before the Cornish, presumably because Cornwall is more cut-off. So, we have a situation where the rivalry between the two lands can be stoked. The Cornish can claim they invented the cream tea because they invented the split, but the Devonians can claim they invented it because they came up with the cream tea we think of today.

The bakery where I grew up in Pudsey, West Yorkshire sold Cornish splits filled with whipped cream, thin seedless raspberry jam and lots of icing sugar. I used to love them, so I was keen to make them myself and have a proper Cornish cream tea.

This enriched dough is a little trickier to work with than regular white bread dough, but you can make it by hand without things becoming too much of a horrible sticky mess. I prefer to use the dough hook these days I must admit. I use strong bread flour to gain a nice rise, but older recipes use regular plain flour; feel free to use it too, but whilst your splits will be more historically authentic, they will be less light for it: your choice!

Makes 12 splits:

500 g white strong bread flour

8 g instant yeast

10 g salt

60g caster sugar

75 g softened butter

280 g warm milk

I’ve written before about making and forming bun dough in more detail before, so if there’s too much brevity here, click this link.

Mix the flour, yeast, salt, sugar in a bowl. Make a well and add the butter and then the milk. If you have a food mixer with a dough hook, mix slowly to combine, then turn up to speed 4 and knead for around 6 minutes or until the dough has become tight and smooth and no longer sticky.

You can of course do all of this by hand, using a little flour for kneading at first until the dough loses its stickiness.

Using your hand, form the dough into a tight ball, pop in a lightly oiled bowl and cover with cling film or a damp tea towel. Leave somewhere warm until it doubles in size, which could take 90 minutes depending upon the ambient temperature.

When ready, divide into 12 equal sized pieces, form them into balls and arrange on a baking sheet. Cover with a large plastic bag or tub and wait for them to prove. Once doubled in size again – it should take much less time than the first rising – place in a cold oven and turn it to 200°C. Bake for 25 minutes, but if at any point, the splits look like they getting too brown, turn the temperature down to 175°C.

When ready, remove from the oven to cooling tray and quickly place clean tea towels over the buns to prevent them crisping up.

When cold, you can sprinkle with sugar if you like, then slice or split and fill with jam and cream.

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References:

The Cornish split, original cream tea accompaniment, Cornwall Live website, www.cornwalllive.com/whats-on/food-drink/cornish-split-original-cream-tea-1336003

Good Things in England, Florence White, 1932

English Bread & Yeast Cookery, Elizabeth David, 1977

Classic Meals: Cream Tea, Foods of England website, http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/creamtea.htm

The Taste of Britain, Catherine Brown & Laura Mason, 1999

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11/10/2019 · 2:07 pm

Clotted Cream

There’s nothing more Cornish than a good blob of clotted cream on a lovely cream tea. Unless you are from Devon of course, then there’s nothing more Devonian than a good blob of clotted cream on a lovely cream tea.

For those not in the know, clotted cream is a very thick cream with a much higher butterfat content than double (heavy) cream; weighing in at 64% and 48% respectively (for comparison, single cream is 18% fat, and full-fat milk is around 4%).

Clotted cream has a long history in Devon and Cornwall, and it is reckoned that it was first introduced to England by Phoenician settlers around 2000 years ago. Phoenicia was on the eastern Mediterranean coast in, what is now Syria, Lebanon and northern Isreal. The clotting of cream was a way of preserving buffalo milk. By removing the watery liquid, leaving mainly butterfat, the growth of spoilage organisms is retarded. The folk of Devonshire knew of its efficacy in this area; it was said that not even a witch’s breath could turn it sour.

If you have ever tried it, you will know that clotted cream – aka clouted cream or scalded cream in older books – is absolutely delicious and is well worth buying. It is possible to make your own and there is a recipe at the end of the post of you would to try your hand at it.

The best thing about it is the buttery, nutty crust that forms on the top as part of the manufacturing process. It is made by gently heating rich milk or cream in large shallow pans to a temperature of 80 to 90°C, the heat traditionally coming from cinders or charcoal. Once the buttery crust had formed, it was carefully but quickly moved to a cool place and sat upon some slate so make the cooling process as rapid as possible; the cold shocking the thin skimmed milk into sinking quickly and making a layer underneath the thick cream. These days, it’s all done with centrifuges, which is rather less romantic.

Once completely cooled, the clotted cream was lifted away with cold, wet hands and mixed in cold, wet wooden bowls to remove the last of the watery milk. It was then layered up in pots. I found a 1755 home recipe from an Elizabeth Cleland who recommended sprinkling rose water and sugar between the layers – the result must have been delicious!

The left-over skimmed milk, by the way, was taken away and either drank or used to make scones or Devonshire splits.

From the point of view of butterfat extraction, clotted cream is a much more efficient method than basic skimming techniques. The reason it is not the standard technique, I assume, is that double skimming requires no heating or centrifuges, tipping the balance of economy in double cream’s favour. Couple this with the fact that modern refrigeration and pasteurisation is doing the lion’s share of the preserving today means that the process of clotting cream is no longer required for that purpose. We eat it for the sheer love of it (ditto smoked fish and meat).

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management says that there are two types of clotted cream: Devonshire and Dutch. She goes on to explain the difference – Dutch clotted cream is thick enough to stand a spoon up in. Now, in my (humble) opinion, it ain’t clotted cream unless you can stand a spoon up in it, so I can only conclude that English clotted cream – at least from a Victorian Londoner’s point of view – was relatively runny compared to that of today’s

Clotted cream is used to make ice cream, some biscuits and as a topping to the old-fashioned pudding Devonshire junket, a sweetened milk dessert set with rennet, producing curds and whey. It can be used to enrich sauces and soups too but use with caution – things can end up too rich.

Rodda’s is the largest producer of clotted cream and is based in Cornwall. There is much debate between the folk of Devon and Cornwall as to whether the cream should be added before or after the jam. Nick Rodda reckons his grandfather knew why:

We always put our cream on top because we are proud of it, Devonians are slightly ashamed of theirs, so they cover it up with their jam.

I must confess to siding with the Devonians on this one. It’s all down to what you think the buttery cream’s role is. The argument goes something like this:

The Cornish: it is the cream, and you wouldn’t put cream under your fruit salad/trifle/fruit tart etc, now would you?

The Devonians: it is the butter, and you wouldn’t spread butter over the jam on your toast/crumpet/muffin etc, now would you?

Your choice.

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Home-Made Clotted Cream

All you need to make your own is some double cream, an oven and patience.

Before…

Preheat your oven to 80°C. Pour around 1 litre of double cream into a wide, shallow ovenproof dish, place it in the oven and leave in there for 12 hours. If you are really patient, leave for 18 hours to achieve a darker, more delicious caramel-flavoured crust.

…after

Carefully remove from the oven, cover with kitchen foil and pop straight into the fridge to cool quickly and undisturbed.

Once fully chilled, lift the clotted cream from the dish and layer up in pots. I filled three good-sized ramekins with mine. The amount of skimmed milk at the bottom will vary depending upon how long you left the cream in the oven for.

The cream keeps for 7 days in the fridge.

References:

Clotted Cream, RS Chavan, A Kumar & S Bhatt, 2016, In Encyclopedia of Food and Health

The Complete Housewife, Elizabeth Cleland, 1755

How do you take your cream tea?, BBC Cornwall website, 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/cornwall/low/people_and_places/newsid_8694000/8694384.stm

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Isabella Beeton, 1861

My Devonshire Book, Henry Harris, 1907

William’s Practical Butter Book, Xerxes Addison Willard, 1875

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