Ham and cheese scones

I recently went to Beaulieu with my family - home of Beaulieu house and abbey, the National Motor Museum, the Top Gear experience and, for 2012, a collection of every car that has featured in a James Bond film to mark the 50th anniversary. It's well worth a day out if you're in the south of England!

We decided to have a picnic and I wanted to bake something savoury. I've never actually made scones before and since this month's Alphabakes letter is H, so I decided to make ham and cheese scones. As usual, this idea came to me while I was at work so I looked on Google (during my lunch break, obviously!) and found this recipe by Barb Gertz. It's supposed to be a low-fat Weightwatchers recipe but I adapted it and it probably isn't particularly low fat any more.

It's an American recipe so it was an excuse to use the cup measures given to me by my boyfriend's mum when they went to America last year.

The recipe is quite straightforward - mix flour, baking powder and a little bit of sugar (see link above for quantities); add marg and rub to make a breadcrumb texture (I assume this is what the recipe means by 'coarse meal').

Add some grated cheese

And some ham. I used tinned ham as I could chop this into cubes quite easily and thought the pieces would be chunky enough that you could taste them when you eat the scone.

Whisk buttermilk and egg white... I had some buttermilk left over from a previous recipe.

Unfortunately I didn't have quite enough buttermillk. I thought about making up the quantity with milk, then had a better idea of something I could use that was also leftover: cheese and onion dip!

I added a spoonful or two of the dip to the scone mixture, but then found the mixture was too wet, so I had to add some extra flour to compensate. Oh well!

When the mixture was the right consistency I was able to knead it and shape it into a ball of dough and then roll it out.

I used a round cookie cutter to cut out the scones and place them on the baking sheet. You can see the flecks of ham and cheese.

After 20 minutes in the oven... ta dah!

 

These tasted really nice and I wasn't sure whether the addition of the cheese and onion dip particularly helped, but the scones did have a lovely cheese flavour and the ham made a nice change too. We enjoyed these on our picnic either spread with some butter or with some cream cheese.

As the Alphabakes letter of the month is H, I am entering my ham and cheese scones in the challenge, which I am hosting this month. Ros will be hosting next month so check out her blog from June 1st to find out what the next letter is - I can't wait to find out myself!