Extra Tender And Sweet Strawberry Cream Scones With Ricotta

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Extra Tender and Sweet Strawberry Cream Scones with Ricotta are well worth baking and enjoying at home or at work if you feel like sharing!

An English scone recipe that incorporates whole milk ricotta cheese and Spring’s first fruit, the sweet strawberry.

A strawberry ricotta scone worth baking and enjoying at home or at work if you feel like sharing!

Meet a scone recipe that takes all of 20-ish minutes to prep, and bakes up perfectly golden in under 30. That recipe would be THIS RECIPE for my Extra Tender And Sweet Strawberry Cream Scones With Ricotta. A strawberry ricotta scone worth baking and enjoying at home or at work if you feel like sharing.

What I enjoy about this strawberry scones recipe is its rustic farm-to-table presentation. These tender squares of traditional teatime treat are mildly sweet with a perfectly tender crumb. They are both fruit scones and cheese scones combined into one beautiful and easy recipe.

My friend Maureen is the scone QUEEN. Whenever she knows I am coming over, she puts on coffee and whips up a sweet compound butter. Her famous scones are baked up beautifully with a perfect crumb and are ready to contentedly host a knob of that sweet compound butter. She absolutely knows they are my favorite thing that she makes. The very first bite is honestly an ‘OMG meter-moment.’

A Game Changing Single Ingredient Hiding In Plain Sight In An Old Family Recipe

Not long ago, I ran across several (what I will refer to as) ‘antique recipes.’ The first was for a rice pudding. I found it among papers which belonged to my Grandmother, Helen Gray DeRemer. It might not seem to you that a rice pudding method would be considered ‘antique.’ Yet I knew just by reading through the handwriting that the the brand of rice specified is no longer being produced and sold under that name. In fact, it fell out back in the 1930s. So yeah, ‘antique rice pudding…’

A Very Little Bit Of Sugar Goes An Awful Long Way…

The other recipes were all for scones. Interestingly enough, not one of the methods was similar in any way to scones I have baked in the past. What was of interest to me was the handwritten ‘note to self’ that the baker, in this case I assume my Grandma Helen, had written on the top of the paper; “Mother’s favourite. Wales.”

Pretty immediately, I know this is likely NOT my Gram’s recipe, but one given to her. The Gray’s were 100% English. The word favorite is very familiarly spelled ‘favourite’ which is English. But I can’t help but wonder if this recipe was given to Gram by her own grandmother, my Great Great Grandmother, Alice Letts Waite whose family were three generations before, from Wales…

If Strawberry Shortcake Is Your ‘Jam,’ Do Not Hesitate To Bake These Strawberry And Cream Scones

I super enjoy a fluffy scones recipe. To put it another way, a soft scones recipe. Light, crumbly, not too sweet. But what I do not enjoy are doorstops. When a scone is not baked through, their density spoils any great flavor they may have for me. The recipes I was holding in my hands from among my Gram’s papers were for a blueberry scones recipe, cinnamon scones, and dried red currant buttermilk scones. The flavoring, whether a fruit or a spice, appear interchangeable on the faded old paper the method is scribbled onto.

These Ricotta Strawberry Scones Are My Easiest Bake, So I Prepare Them Often

I, of course, jumped headlong into the ingredients. I assessed in my mind what I already had and what I would still need. Without so much as a trip to the grocer, I was reaching for my large mixing bowl and the baking sheet.

I followed the cryptic scribble three times. As much as I told myself that I enjoyed each finished product, whether with berries or zest or sweet spices, the bakes were all…dry. I was losing my lust for the scone quite frankly. Previous attempts at this simple ‘cold butter to flour to baking soda dough’ were just as uninspiring to my palette.

Yes, the scone on the bottom right of this photo is half gone because I ate it…I COULDN’T WAIT!

What are good ingredients to put in scones?

I made dough using more sugar, less sugar, orange juice, orange zest, and even tried being clever by adding grated frozen butter to the flour mixture. No luck. What was I doing wrong? On the bottom of my new found recipe for scones was handwriting much different from the handwriting for the recipe and method. It also appeared newer. It reads “3:1 dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Add farm cheese if stiff.” And just like that, the lightbulb switched on!

Knowing that my bake was drying out every time was killing me. My shopping list was severely tipped with the need to replace my all purpose flour almost weekly. After a while, I relied on Maureen’s invitations or ‘just meh store-boughts.’ That is, until the lightbulb. The ‘farm cheese’ the note was referencing was for farmers cheese. It’s a mild white fresh cheese that’s not pressed or aged. Once in your hand, it’s got a crumbly texture and its flavor is very subtle.

How do you make a ricotta cheese dough?

Farmer’s cheese and its close cousin ricotta cheese are fairly interchangeable when it comes to recipes. Having the ability to first whip the cheese until it’s smooth was a game changer as this single ingredient would lend a hand in creating a very soft, very flakey dough. Sweet ricotta scones with spring’s first fruit, the strawberry.

Ricotta cheese and a scant amount of whipping cream keep this easy scone recipe just above that imaginary line that separates dry and dense from crumbly and tender. The addition of a cup or so of chopped strawberries distribute even more moisture while the bake is in the oven.

I am sure to add only enough sugar to the dough to give it flavor. The remaining flavor comes from the natural sugar in the fruit, in this case fresh strawberry, and raw sugar sprinkled over a light brushstroke of whipping cream to the tops just before the batch is popped into a hot oven.

Baking up Extra Tender And Sweet Strawberry Cream Scones With Ricotta in my new Kitchenaid oven.

How To Make Scones

I have been known to cut my fresh strawberries into tiny pieces, transfer to a small bowl, and add just a teaspoon of vanilla extract to them. I absolutely do this if using chopped frozen strawberries to give them a boost. They sit for about 30 minutes to absorb the vanilla. The taste is subtle in the end, the strawberry the more dominant profile. But it’s noticeable. And, it’s GOOD.

I pulse my dough ingredients – baking powder, flour, sugar, and salt – together with COLD butter in the barrel of my food processor. Yes, I have a pastry cutter, but it makes more sense with today’s equipment to bake a better end product while making life easy on ourselves.

I then transfer the coarse crumbs to a large bowl and incorporate the wet ingredients. If I am feeling whimsical, I always toss in 1/4 cup of the itty bitty chocolate chips I find in the grocer. I simply whisk together with the berries and add everything to the dough at once.

Kneading is usually no more than a dozen strokes. The scone dough will be nearly smooth. And, like my Grandmother and her grandmother before her, we do not waste. This is where I could get into scones vs biscuits and cutting circles vs wedges from a bannock.

I avoid it because I shape the dough into a 10-inch x 4-inch rectangle and use my bench scraper to make one long cut down the middle and five cuts across. I am left with 12 squares to place about an inch to two apart on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.

Much Of The Bake Time For These Scones Will Depend On Your Oven.

After the brushstroke of heavy cream and sprinkle of sugar, the lot goes into the oven for between 18 and 25 minutes. Much of the bake time will depend on your oven, so you MUST begin testing for doneness at around 18 minutes. Once they’re tinging on golden brown and baked through, I remove the baking sheet and loosen the scones with a spatula.

I DO NOT REMOVE them from the baking sheet, rather allow them to keep cooking as the hot baking sheet cools down on my counter. It’s just one tiny step that adds to the overall proper doneness. These strawberry and ricotta scones are not low carb by any means. And, who would want them to be? They’re a coffee and teatime treat!

All images and text ©Jenny DeRemer for Not Entirely Average, LLC