Whole Wheat Oatmeal Scones

If you’re not familiar with scones, they’re something akin to a cake-like biscuit, native to the British Isles. Our Americanized version isn’t a whole lot like the original, but it’s delicious. If you make these scones the night before, they make good “pocket” food for a hike.  Just split one and slather on some marmalade, wrap it up in a piece of waxed paper, and off you go.  Straight out of the oven, they’re crumbly, moist, and delicious.

Whole Wheat Oatmeal Scones

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter cut into small pieces
1/2 cup quick oatmeal
3 tablespoons Turbinado sugar
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 to 3/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup dried blueberries, cherries, or cranberries

Preheat oven to 450F.  Mix the first five ingredients and cut the butter into the flour mixture using either a pastry blender or two knives.  Keep at it until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal.  Stir in the oatmeal, sugars, and dried fruit.  Make a well in the center of your mixture and add the egg, vanilla, and most of the milk.  Stir together quickly to form a wet dough – don’t knead or stir the dough too much.  Add more milk if necessary (I had to use almost a cup).  The dough should be almost too wet to handle.  Turn out on a well-floured surface and pat down to about 3/4 inch thickness.  Now, you can form it into a round and cut it into wedges or just use a glass or biscuit cutter to make round scones.  Pie-shaped wedges are traditional.

Put them on a lightly greased cookie sheet. They tend to spread a lot – don’t worry if they join together because they’re easy to break apart after they’re done. You can see in the picture above that mine started out round and joined to make wedge shapes. I also sprinkled a bit of the Turbinado sugar over the tops just for looks.

Bake for 10-15 minutes or until the scones start to brown.  You can let them cool completely if you want to carry them with you but they’re really good hot out of the oven!

Adapted from Bob’s Red Mill Whole Wheat Scottish Oatmeal Scones. The original recipe states these are 250 calories per scone but I added dried fruit, which will up the calorie count a tiny bit.