Blueberry orange yogurt scones

Inspired by Johanna's recent post about her scones, and by Choclette's recent chocolate chip scones, I decided it was long overdue for me to make some more of these delicious treats. I particularly enjoy scones because they're so good for snacks and seem a good way to have a sweet treat without too much fat or sugar.

I had a large pot of yogurt in the fridge that really needed to be used up and recalled that a few months ago Sainsbury's magazine had a feature written by Dan Lepard for scones. There's a basic recipe and then various sweet and savoury variations; blueberry clementine, triple-chocolate pecan, double ginger and apple, almond cherry and then savoury red chilli and tomato, onion, herb and bacon. I can't say the savoury ones are anything I'd usually want to try but the tomato based ones look really good! So, taking inspiration from the blueberry clementine recipe, I decided to make blueberry orange flavoured scones.

I've adapted the recipe a bit to suit what I had available (who has 25ml of double cream hanging round? and what do I do with the rest of the pot once it's open? that ingredient went pretty quickly!). The original recipes can be found in the November 2010 issue of the Sainsbury's magazine.

Blueberry and orange yogurt scones

Ingredients

175g wholemilk yogurt

75g caster sugar

400g plain flour

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

50g cold diced butter

zest of 1 large orange plus 50ml juice (but see below)

100g dried sweetened blueberries

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 6 1/2/210C. Put a piece of baking parchment on a tray.

- Stir the sugar into the yogurt and leave for a few minutes to dissolve.

- Sift (and I actually did - normally too lazy) the flour, bicarb and cream of tartar into a large bowl.

- Rub in the butter, then add the dried blueberries and stir to mix.

- Zest the orange into the yogurt mixture and add the juice to this.

- Mix the wet ingredients into the dry and bring together to form a dough. At this point I thought it looked a little dry, but persevered, turning the dough out and trying to form it, but ended up putting it back in the bowl to add some more liquid. I think it needs about 2tbsp more liquid than stated in the ingredients above.

- Pat out to about an inch and a half thick and cut out scones in the size you choose. I used a small cutter (2 inch) and got 19 normal scones and a massive offcut scone!

- Moisten the tops a little (I used water here) and sprinkle with demerara sugar.

- Bake for about 12-15 minutes until lightly golden brown.

- Allow to cool on a wire rack, or eat warm if you really can't wait!

This recipe differs quite a bit to my usual recipe. I usually use self raising flour rather than plain plus raising agents and more butter but less sugar. They were reasonably successful but I didn't think they were quite as light as my usual ones. However, this could be due to me overworking the dough with it being initially too dry and having to add more liquid. The flavours were great though - dried blueberries are delicious, it's just a pity they're so expensive usually, and the orange flavour made them interesting enough to eat without butter, although served slightly warmed and with butter would be my favourite way to eat these. I ought to give the recipe another go, perhaps the apple and ginger variation - two of my favourite ingredients!