Sclones

This has turned into an epic weekend of baking- red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting on Friday, garlic knots on Saturday, and now, Sunday night, vanilla bean scones.  I've decided that they're not quite scones, but more like a cousin of a scone, which is why I've dubbed them "sclones".   Like a scone knock-off.  Either way, according to my housemates, they're certifiably delicious.

I've been trying to find a scone recipe which wasn't incredibly terrible for you, and after some searching I came across these vanilla bean scones.  I've had vanilla beans lounging around in my cabinet for a while, so I was excited to finally get to use some of them.  I mostly just followed the recipe online, with a few small changes.  To start with, I "cut" the butter into the flour mixture using two butter knives, which was a little labor intensive but gave me the coarse consistency I wanted.  The only substitution I made in the recipe was low fat sour cream instead of full fat, in an attempt to make these scones only sort of bad for you instead of really bad.  I think this substitution may have contributed to the slightly un-scone-like character, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.  I tried making the dough into a circle and then cutting it, but it was really sticky and the pieces seemed too big, so then I had to cut them again and the shapes were really awkward.  Next time I make these, I think I'm going to either just blob these out (like flattish cookies) or at least stretch the dough into more of a rectangle shape and then cut that into pieces.  I also, after cutting the pieces, wet my hands with some water and smoothed the tops so it wouldn't look so ugly.  Next time I also need to remember to space these out more, because I tried to fit them all onto one pan and some of them expanded until they were touching.

For the glaze I used milk instead of cream, and added in a vanilla bean for flavor and aesthetics.  I'm not sure how I feel about the glaze, which is basically confectioners sugar and vanilla, and it got mixed reviews from my taste testers too- some really liked it, while others preferred the sclones without anything drizzled on top.

The sclones were definitely a hit, and definitely something I will make again.  They were light and crumbly with a delicate vanilla flavor.  Not quite scone-y, as I said before, but still wonderful nonetheless.