Let's Tessellate

Preventing Waste with Triangular Scones

If you know me at all, you’ll know that my plight for the perfect scone lasted many years, and only after working on a daytime TV show with Rosemary Shrager did I crack the code. At the time, The Shragerbomb (as I affectionately named her) had a patisserie in Tunbridge Wells, for which Mark, a bouncy little French chap, did all the baking. His scones were light as a feather, and despite my daily begging him for the recipe, he was steadfast on keeping it a secret. But my incessant charm eventually eroded a chink in his armour, and he kindly gave me a single clue in his strong French accent: “crème fraîche”.

After that I spent a couple of weeks tweaking recipes I’d already developed over the years, trying some made entirely with crème fraîche, others with a mixture of wet ingredients. Eventually I landed on this, what I now consider to be the perfect scone.

But only recently, when baking a double batch for the cast and crew of the pantomime I have been performing in at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford, did I come up with the time saving decision to cut the dough into triangles rather than discs. I usually do that with more American-style scones (pumpkin spice and blueberry glazed), which I make absolutely gigantic. But wanting to eke the dough out for the brilliant theatre team, I decided this time to make them into miniature triangles, similar in size to a dainty morsel you’d get on an afternoon tea.

My laziness paid off, because not only did the dough yield three or four more scones than usual, there were absolutely no offcuts to either waste or roll back up so many times that the final scone was so tough and shrivelled from all the extra prodding and poking.

Forget What Your Granny Taught You

After decoding the perfect recipe, the toughest thing to contend with has been (and still is) convincing people to dispense with age-old traditions and rules with their scone making. People gasp and wince when I tell them to knead the dough for just 30 seconds to a minute. Some laugh, arrogantly omniscient, at my foolishness. Then, when I tell people to rest the dough, they look at me like I’ve just spat at them while driving over their toes. I’m not here to be purposefully disruptive, but one thing I am proud to do, is question everything. Yes, your granny may have made the most wonderful scones in the history of civilisation, but, dear reader, I doubt they’d have been this good…