Orange Poppy Seed Scones

I've always enjoyed me some scones, but felt they were more effort than they were worth to make myself. And thus I suffered through years of sugar saturated coffee shop scones. Damn you Starbucks, damn you. But lo, behold these awesome scones made with these two hands of mine. Messy? yes. Hard? no...

We had a pot-luck(ish) sign up for work on Labor Day so I thought I'd test out my scone abilities on people that hardly know me. But everyone likes scones, right? I don't have a pastry knife/blender/thingy, and as I'm sure you all know, scones are a dough requiring you to cut cold butter into the dry ingredients. Your success in this cutting of butter is essentially what makes or breaks your scones as it is the striation of still-cold butter within the pastry that creates the tender, flaky layers that we all love. 

The two-knives approach to cutting the butter was similar to trying to cut peas without a fork. After a couple minutes of me basically pushing around cubes of cold butter with knives, I gave up and turned to the two most reliable tools in my kitchen: my hands. This proved pretty effective if you ignore the fact that I now had monster-dough-coated hands (and thus the lack of prep pictures here). After a quick molestation of the butter and flour, all I had to do now was pat out the dough to about 1/2" thickness and cut it into triangles (isosceles as well as right).

Judging by how fast these left the plate at work (I didn't even get one, good thing I ate the broken one before heading in) I'd say these were a success. They were soft, they were light., they were flavorful without being sickly sweet. I'm never buying those sucrose delivery systems at chain coffee shops again. Expect more scone posts in the future.