Welsh Cakes - Mom

Being less versatile than a Scottish highland griddle scone didn't stop Welsh cakes from making a frequent appearance in our home when I was growing up.  Mostly because of my Dad's incessant requesting of them, he preferred them to scones because they are sweeter and richer.  I think in his mind a scone is meant to be dessert, unlike the rest of us with the mentality that scones start as the savoury part of lunch then become the sweet finish.  I can see his point, if you use bread to make a jam sandwich it's still a sandwich, it's not really dessert even if it is sweeter than a ham sandwich.  So when the lunch crowd became too big for one batch of scones the second batch was Welsh cakes and Dad was happy.
 
I had some difficulties getting things right in my practise runs on these and some research brought out one main difference between our family and the rest of the world in that everyone else seems to cut their scones with a round cutter then gather up the scraps and pat the dough out again.  We cut triangles, in the same tradition as Scottish scones, so the resulting conclusion was that my Welsh cakes were probably too big.  My other issue was that my griddle was again too hot, the griddle needs to be hotter than 3 on my stove but much cooler than 4, if I leave it on 3 it just seems to dry out the dough it doesn't brown or fluff up in the cooking, but switch to 4 for a moment and suddenly it's browned long before it has the chance to cook half-way through.  An electric griddle with a temperature gauge that moves up by actual temperature degrees is really your best bet but I live in London and homes are small, I don't have room for one, I barely have room for a dedicated scone pan. 
 
Just to give you an idea of what happens when the temperature goes really wrong, the cake has browned on both sides but the insides were still raw, really raw and in order to cook it through you need to balance it on its edges and keep cooking it, this one was so raw that balanced on edge the dough inside decided to conform to the laws of gravity and started sliding down to the lower edge bulging it out and, viola, wedge shaped cake - miniature people can go skiing on it.

Welsh Cakes

Heat your griddle to medium heat, this will take some playing around with to find the right temperature.

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients
3 cups of flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar

Then cut in or rub in like you would for pastry
1 cup butter

Add the remaining wet ingredients
1 cup raisins  (the recipe says 3/4 cup raisins and 1/4 cup mixed peel but we never used mixed peel)
2 eggs
1/3 cup milk

Mix with a rubber spatula until it forms a stiff dough, don't be tempted to add more milk you're going to be patting this out with your hands and picking up pieces of it, it needs to be stiff.

Take your spatula and divide the dough in the bowl into quarters and kind of push/slap each quarter into sort of a smooth lump, even when stiff this dough is quite sticky but you don't want to knead it too much once it's mixed or it goes tough so I find some shaping in the bowl helps with handling.  Scoop out one of the lumps onto a well floured board or counter top and pat it into a round about 1/2 inch thick and cut into quarters using a sharp knife, you have to cut through the raisins a table knife or metal spatual won't do this.  If you have too much flour on them give them a flip back and forth in your hands before transferring to the griddle see the scone entry for an action photo if you need an illustration of what I'm talking about, I didn't have anyone around to take the picture for me today.

Cook on both sides on the medium heat griddle until golden brown and if you can still see raw dough on the edges it will be necessary to cook them on the edges too.  I don't know what people who cut rounds do when they need to keep cooking, score 1 for triangles.

When they're done, transfer to a wire rack to cool, brush any flour clinging to them off with a pastry brush or similar tool.

They're best to eat when they're still a bit warm, split them open and fill with butter and jam and be generous this is dessert after all!

Sandwich back together and munch away.

Scottish Scones or Highland Griddle Scones

The only meal that is a mandatory requirement when I see my Mom, whether I visit her or she visits me, is the Scone Lunch.  This is a meal that has been passed down the generations in our family in my memories from my Grandma Ross, although I know she learned how to make scones from her mother and can only guess how many generations before.  Scottish scones are my first baking memory, standing on a step-stool in Grandma's kitchen in the house on Mallard St, watching her papery skinned wrinkled fingers softly working the dough, turning them into scones on her aluminum electric griddle.  Making scones with her was an apprenticeship, I learned components of the process in stages, a bit at a time, how to cut the dough, to turn the scones so they cook on all sides, how to rub the butter into the flour, and my favourite bit (even still today) flipping the dough in your hands to knock the excess flour off.  I don't think she ever let me make a full batch on my own so in a way I never graduated.  In my defense, she didn't leave very good instructions for my continuing education behind, the only copy we have of her recipe is in a very tattered old copy of a United Church Women's cook book, most of the ladies at church would have been invited round for a scone lunch and they must have pestered her into including the recipe, I almost wonder if she didn't want to share the recipe because if you hadn't ever made them you would read this and not even try.

This is the hardest baking I have ever done, in preparation for this blog entry I made 5 batches in the space of about a month, under the guidance of my Mom and picking her brains for every tip and trick that she can remember from her Mom.  If you are at all interested in making these, please take heart that I still feel nerves about them turning out wrong when I'm making them.  I really don't know how to write this any better than she did, I'll try to make it fit my recipe writing style but I don't promise anything easy.

Grandma Chrissie Ross' Scones

In a mixing bowl, add
Flour, a 2 cup measuring cup filled until it is heaped up, a really big round heap of flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda, generously rounded not flat
1 tsp cream of tartar, again generously rounded not flat
mix well and leave to rest for half an hour at least - don't skip this I don't know why it's necessary but there is magic in the wait

After resting the flour rub into the flour mix
Butter the size of a large walnut - go buy some walnuts in their shells if you can't gauge

At this point pre-heat an electric griddle to around 345^F, or make a wild guess with a frying pan on the stove top, I have settings 1-6 on my stove and need a heat setting between 3 and 4, they don't brown at 3 and they brown too fast at 4, I adjust back and forth.  Use a nice big pan with a flat bottom, if you can find a square pan all the better, do not add grease or cooking spray to the pan, heat it DRY, the flour on the scones will stop them from sticking I promise, but you can use a non-stick pan if you are skeptical.

Make a well in the centre and add
1 egg
2 tablespoons of golden syrup or pancake syrup (or for a short while we used honey from Mom's bees)
1 to 1 1/4 cups of milk - use half evaporated milk and half water (start with 1 cup and add the rest only if needed), the evaporated milk makes the insides yellow and much richer than plain milk
Mix to make a soft dough, do not over mix but there cannot be any lumps of flour and it should be stiff enough to be handled with just your fingers and a knife, no spatulas or flippers or rolling pins allowed.  Turn out a third of the dough onto a well floured counter cover the top with more flour and pat the dough out to a round.

Be sure to push the flour up from the board onto the edges of the round as you pat it in case you need to cook the edges.

Cut into 6 triangles, make a little ridge line of flour with your knife before cutting through and push the flour down into the cut, wiggle the knife side to side a bit as you go.

Use your knife to pick up each triangle, then flip it back and forth between your hands to knock the excess flour off before putting it on the griddle.

Cook for approximately 4 minutes on the first side then 3 minutes on the other side until pale golden brown.  You only get one flip but you can peek at the underside to see if it's ready to turn.  If the edges look a bit raw but the scone is browned, you can flip it up on the cut edge and turn it to cook on all the edges, the heat will go up through the scone in the insides will come out fluffy and pretty.

Once cooked cool them on a wire rack, then take a stiff bristle brush and brush off the rest of the flour before serving.  It makes enough for 4 greedy people to have scones for lunch/dessert or 6 polite people who are getting something else for dessert, I'll explain a bit later.

Be careful not to over cook the scones, my Grandpa Sidney was pretty sensitive to the level of brown that a scone reached and had a rather unkind phrase for one that was too brown.  He called them 'telephone scones' because he assumed that Grandma was chatting away on the phone when she should have been watching the scones.  There's a good one on the left and a telephone scone on the right.

The beauty of a Scottish Scone is that it starts as lunch and becomes dessert.  Our family's scone lunch must have canned salmon (British Columbia sockeye if you can find it) mixed up into a spread, butter, cheese and raspberry and other jams, additional nice things are salad vegetables in the summer to make your savoury sandwiches more interesting and soup in the winter because it's warm, lastly my Dad is fond of peanut butter on his dessert scones (although he was initially viewed as a heathen by his in laws for this request).  Start with the savouries and move on to the jams when you're nearly full.

A final word of warning, these scones go stale fast, they are soft and slightly moist and fluffy the day they are baked, they go dry and crumbly and mealy overnight.  Do not under any circumstances make them a day in advance, either be piggy enough to eat them all on the day they are baked or throw them away. 

They will take patience and practice, in my case a lifetime of trying and I'm still not quite there yet, but I'm getting closer and I now have the courage to invite friends round for a scone lunch and even to tell them that they're getting scones for lunch before they come.

Mmmmm, fish on a scone, it makes it all worth it.