This week for my baking inquiry I decided to make cheese scones! I had a hard time deciding on what kind of scone to make and had my heart set on raspberry scones but because they are not in season, I didn’t want to take the risk of them not turning out, so I chose cheese instead; a classic. While researching recipes for cheese scones I found that they were honestly all very similar and had common techniques in order to obtain a nice flaky texture and a good rise. The trick is to have cold cubed butter and combine that with your flour mixture so that there are no large lumps and to knead the dough around 6 to 7 times, enough to combine all the ingredients and flour but not too much to make them hard and disc like. Another thing I learned from research is that cheese scones require a large amount of baking powder, I guess this is to help them rise but when I was adding the baking powder it felt like I was doing something wrong! Quite a few recipes called for cayenne pepper which I also thought was strange but I went with it anyway.
During the baking process of my cheese scones I actually felt fairly confident. The first thing the recipe called for was to combine all dry ingredients which was 95% of the ingredients so that was nice. Next was to cut in the cold butter and start to combine it with the flour, making sure there wasn’t any large lumps. After this, I added the cheese and buttermilk and they were pretty much done. From there all you need to do start to form a ball and knead the dough. When I came to the point where I was trying to form a ball I hard a hard time because there was so much flour still and I started to doubt myself just a little bit in my measuring capabilities. This step took some time to work with the dough until it was malleable enough to knead without cracking. After kneading way more then the recommended 6 to 7 times I rolled out the dough and started to cut out circles to make my scones. 
After baking, the scones came out really well! I was very happy with how much they rose and with the overall color on the outside. When I cut them open they were very flaky and had a nice airiness to them which I think was caused by all the baking powder. They had a perfect flavor balance of sweet and salty and everyone who tried them really enjoyed them, which definitely built up my baking confidence. Overall I think I would rate these scones a 9/10! They tasted really good and the only negative thing I would say about them is that they were small in size. The recipe said I could make 16, but even with cutting them a little larger and making 12, they were still pretty small. So next time I might double my recipe and make them a little larger.
