Thursday, September 25, 2014

It's a Pumpkin Scone Showdown

As with pretty much everyone in the northeast, pumpkin fever has taken hold of me. I've not yet had a pumpkin spice latte, mainly because I finally broke down and looked at the calories and sugar and it is basically equal to five years of my life. Sigh. But eventually.

For now, I've settled on an excuse to bake a lot of scones. I mean...how ELSE would I decide between two pumpkin spice scone recipes? Muah ha ha!


I first went to my girl Joy the Baker and her recipe. I omitted the pecans, but followed everything else. The dough stayed pretty wet, as it had a considerable amount of pumpkin puree in it, in addition to browned butter. It was so wet, in fact, that the directions said to scoop out the scones with an ice cream scoop (the finished product for this recipe is up there on the left).

It starts in the usual way. This recipe actually had no egg--all the moisture came from pumpkin puree and butter, plus a splash of buttermilk.


Here's the buttermilk, pumpkin, and some vanilla. Looks like a crazy flan, right?
 Even after adding the dry ingredients the dough stayed loose. Normally, this is where I'd panic. But if Joy tells you to scoop the dough with an ice cream scoop, then you do it. Thankfully they held their shape when plopped onto the baking sheets. Since this was a scoopable dough, my hands stayed nice and clean: no kneading!


Of course I stood by my usual ritual of sitting on the floor in front of the oven while they baked to make sure nothing went horribly awry. As the kitchen started to smell incredible, I settled in and felt confident they'd be good. While the scones were cooling off I made the glaze, which was mainly browned butter and confectioner's sugar. It whisked up nice and thick, not quite like Royal icing, but not too far from that consistency.

It was torture not to just inhale them on the spot!
With recipe one completed, it was time to turn to the second recipe. I happened upon this one thanks to simply Googling around for "pumpkin spice scone recipe." After reading through a few, I landed on this one, which claims to replicate the pumpkin scones at Starbucks (well, before La Boulange took over as the bakery suppliers for the coffee chain).

From the get-go, I had a hunch this recipe might eek out over Joy's. I've learned from making a few scones from Joy's website that she prefers cakeier and fluffier scones, whereas I prefer the variety that are drier and almost biscuity. This dough had a smaller wet team (still using pumpkin, butter, and buttermilk, but in smaller proportions). This was going places.


Kneading the dough in flour helped absorb any lingering moisture so it could be rolled out and cut.
I got a pretty intense case of club hand, so John had to come to my rescue to add a bit more flour to knead the dough. I could have pressed it out and used a round cutter like I typically do, but since the recipe said to cut it into triangles, I figured I'd give that a whirl.

I was a little worried at this point--the instructions said to roll it to an inch depth in about a 10X17 rectangle. But there was no way that amount of dough would stretch to that size and stay that thick. So I said, "Well, time to improvise." So I rolled it out to a rectangle big enough to let me cut out 8 triangles. They were pretty thin, so I was just hoping they'd rise up nicely in the oven!

Thank goodness they did! These guys got a double shot of glaze, too.


And now...which scone reigned supreme? After testing amongst myself and John as well as a handful of my coworkers...








Triangle scone won! It got points for texture, glaze, and flavor. Though supporters of Joy's liked the soft texture, lack of crumbs, and better spices. John prefers the rounds, I prefer the triangles. A house divided. But everyone still wins. Yum yum.

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