Land of my Victoria

On the morning of the 29th of December the rain hammered down, as it had a tendency to do during quite a few parts of the Christmas Break. As a result of this I decided to stay in and make something a little bit more traditional and British in the form of Victoria Scones.

The soundtrack to the cooking was appropriately the Kinks' 1969 album Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) which is an excellent concept album about the theme stated in its title. It is often remembered for its opening track Victoria which is probably better known to modern audiences for the inferior cover version by the Kooks.

I dropped eight ounces of self-raising flour into a mixing bowl and mixed it with two ounces of white caster sugar.

In a separate bowl I beat an egg before adding it to the flour and sugar together with a touch under a quarter of a pint of milk. I stirred the ingredients together with a metal tablespoon until I had formed a soft dough, however before I kneaded the dough I added about two ounces of plain flour so that the dough did not stick to the bowl or the work surface when I rolled it out.

I often find when making dough for bread, biscuits, buns or scones that I initially make the dough too sloppy. I can often get round this however by adding enough flour to dry it out which I then knead into the dough.

In this recipe I kneaded the dough by keeping it in the bowl and punching it with my clenched fist and then turning it over and doing the same thing again until I had a dough that was reasonably dry but very flexible.

I rolled the dough out until it was about one centimetre thick all the way through. I then cut five centimetre wide shapes out of it and put them on a baking tray covered with a sheet of thoroughly greased kitchen foil. I  then used a butter knife to mark each scone into four quarters.

So as to make the scones a bit more aesthetically pleasing I added a glace cherry in each marked quarter on top of the scone. The scones were then cooked on 180 degrees (190 degrees if it's not a fan oven) in the oven for fifteen minutes until the edges began to turn brown.

Freshly cooked prior to quartering up to take to a house party.

After leaving them to cool on a wire rack for about an hour I quartered the scones up. The taste was like that of sweet white bread, which is how scones should always taste in my view, and glace cherries helped and an extra burst of sweetness to stop the taste being too bland. The scones when cut into quarters made excellent bite size snacks which were perfect to take to house parties as I hope the hosts of the parties I took them to during Christmas and New Year will agree.