Scones for the Avid Bakers Challenge

For this month Avid Baker's Challenge we got a recipe with a long name: "Big-batch scone mix a.k.a. scrumptious scones for hurried people" from "The Weekend Baker" by Abigail Dodge. I don't think I've made scones before. I ate them on several occasions and saw them being made on quite a few cooking programms on the BBC. So I know they have to be fluffy and flaky and are not to be overworked when making the dough.

I didn't make the big batch, but just made enough for 8 scones. Making the larger badge is very handy when you want to bake them more often, but as I didn't want to do that at this point I made a small batch instead.
I choose the orange zest/cranberry version and that was really delicious. I'm not sure if they meant to rise more, but they were lovely buttery and tasted like orange cake (maybe even better!). I also liked the fact that you just cut the dough in wedges. I saw scones being cut out with a round cutter on tv, and then you'd have to rework the left overs which doesn't do the scone texture much good.

One (maybe) handy tip for handling the dough. As it was very sticky and hard to handle, I placed the dough on a large piece of parchment paper and shaped it into a round by lifting up -one side at the time- and pressing the dough together and in shape with care. (Hope you can follow that) Anyway that worked for me.

I certainly will make some more scones in the near future, because they were eating with love by the whole family. As usual I substituted the dairy (buttermilk/butter) with soy yogurt(with some lemon juice added)/veg. margarine. Can't wait to find out the next challenge....