00:00 Hello, my name is Andrew Gravett. I'm the pastry chef at the Langham Hotel and we're going to make our fruit scones.
00:05 The first thing to do is to mix the flour with butter.
00:18 Make sure that the butter is very, very cold, so straight from the fridge and even sometimes it can be directly from the freezer.
00:27 The baking powder, sugar and salt. So we mix everything in the bowl together.
00:32 I'm going to put it onto the machine. So we're going to leave this to mix for about 10 to 15 minutes until we get a very fine sandy texture.
00:41 So as you can see we've got a very fine sandy texture. So the butter and the flour are well mixed together.
00:52 We're just going to add on a slow speed the egg and the milk to the texture that we want.
00:57 So you might find that at times you don't add all the egg in. It really depends on how much moisture that type of flour will absorb.
01:09 It's just plain flour but different flours will absorb different quantities of liquid.
01:18 We're just going to remove it from the machine and we're going to finish to work it.
01:22 So now we're just going to sprinkle a little bit of flour onto the top. Not too much.
01:27 The dough onto there. Making sure we get everything out.
01:33 We're just going to work this dough. You can see at the moment there's not really any texture to it. It's a soft dough, no resistance.
01:43 The more that we work it we're going to start making the dough slightly elastic. The more elastic it is it means we're working the gluten.
01:50 As the baking powder pushes up the scone the gluten will hold the scone in the shape we want it.
01:55 If we don't work the scone enough the texture and the flavour of the actual scone eating it should be nice.
02:00 But we won't have such a straight sided scone. It will be slightly flat on the bottom.
02:05 By doing this working will enable us to have presentation wise something that's straighter.
02:11 It's much like kneading a dough for bread. By the end of this kneading the dough should become smoother.
02:18 And it's very tempting to add flour all the time to stop it from sticking.
02:24 Ideally you want to add the least amount possible. So it's only when it's really sticking to the table that you need to add more flour.
02:32 So now we're just going to add the fruit into the dough.
02:37 If we were just making a plain scone obviously we wouldn't be doing this stage. We'll just work them in.
02:42 Just try and make sure that there's fruit in all of the scone.
02:51 We're just going to roll the dough out. A little bit more flour.
02:58 A little bit on the top.
03:04 And we're going to roll it out to around just under 2cm.
03:11 Just smooth it over. Make sure it's not sticking to the table.
03:16 And then that's ready to cut.
03:24 So we're just using a small stainless cutter. It's very thin and quite sharp so that it will give us hopefully a good clean cut.
03:33 We're going to flour the ring each time.
03:35 And we press down, not closing the cutter but just pressing down leaving it open.
03:40 Otherwise it creates a vacuum and squashes the scone down.
03:44 And just a quick burst of flouring each time just to stop the scone from sticking.
03:56 We're trying to touch the scone the least amount possible so that we keep its round shape and not to mark the top.
04:06 So now the scones are cut. We've just got a mix of egg yolk, a little bit of sugar and some salt in this egg wash.
04:15 And we're just going to brush each scone with a layer of wash and this will give us a nice golden colour on top when they're baked.
04:24 Just a little tip, you can make these scones the day before, keep them in the fridge, take them out of the fridge, leave them for about 10-15 minutes to come to temperature and then bake them.
04:35 So the scones are baked and just out of the oven. So we're just going to finish off the scones as I would like to eat them.
04:48 So we're just going to slice the scones.
04:51 We're going to put a good scoop of jam onto each scone.
05:05 Then a nice spoon of clotted cream.
05:17 A little icing sugar on the lids of the scone.
05:43 And there are our fruit scones with apricot jam and clotted cream.
05:47 [Music]
