A Return to Baking: Apple Spiced Scones

I freakin' love fall. There I said it. The crunch of the leaves, the crisp smell of the air, the warm colors of the trees...

Magical.

I also freakin' love scones. When I saw the recipe for these apple spiced scones on Skinnytaste yesterday, I knew that I had to get back to baking. Now that our kitchen in the new apartment is pretty much all unpacked and painted(!), I'm starting to make the kitchen my own again and beginning to get acquainted with my new oven. I feel like I should name it. Maybe I'll call it Gladys.

My preferred scone recipe is a whole wheat cherry scone that I came across a few years ago on the interwebs, but I'm always looking for new recipes for my favorite breakfast treat. My friends and I went apple picking a few weekends ago, and as you can probably imagine, we still have a glut of apples hanging out in our fridge. What better way to put them to use than in something delicious?

Scones fresh out of the oven.

The kitchen smelled AMAZING while these morsels were cooking. Sort of like as if you were baking an apple pie and banana bread simultaneously. UH-mazing.

I followed the Skinnytaste recipe pretty much word for word with a few substitutions. I used the lemon juice/milk substitution for buttermilk. I didn't have applesauce, so I just used a one-for-one substitution with vegetable oil. I'm sure they would be even more apple-y if you used the sauce. Also, I just used straight-up whole wheat flour because I don't stock the white whole wheat flour regularly in my pantry.

My dough was very sticky (maybe it would have been less so with the applesauce?), so if your dough is like this too, I would recommend forming the dough into a round on a cutting board, flipping it onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and cutting it into twelve wedges once on the baking sheet. I learned that this would have been the better technique by doing things the hard way and cutting the wedges first. I had to reroll the dough into a disk on the baking sheet. Oopsy.

EDIT: I also might refrigerate my dough for a little bit before working with it. I usually do this when I make my cherry scones, and it really makes handling and cutting the dough much easier!

A solitary scone...

...plus cinnamon/nutmeg sugar glaze...

Glorious!

Also, the scones themselves aren't super sweet and are almost like an apple cake/scone combo. Thus, they really need the sugar glaze to give you that satisfying sweetness in every bite. One of my baking life mottos is that you can never really have enough glaze on baked goods, so the more the merrier. I wound up using pretty much all of the glaze that the recipe makes, which gave me a nice hearty drizzle of glaze in every bite. Enjoy!

Delightful Apple Spiced Scones

From Skinnytaste

Ingredients:

1/2 cup cold buttermilk
1/4 cup unsweetened apple sauce (or oil)
1/4 cup dark brown sugar, packed (light brown works, too)
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
cooking spray (I used parchment paper instead)
1 cup white whole wheat flour (I used plain whole wheat flour)
1 cup all purpose flour  
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp chilled butter (must be cold) cut into small pieces
2 cups diced apples, peeled (I used Jonathan)

For the glaze:
1 cup powdered sugar, sifted
1/2 tsp cinnamon
pinch nutmeg
2 tbsp cold fat free milk (plus 1/2 tbsp if needed)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375°.

Combine the first five ingredients in a medium bowl, stirring with a whisk. Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray.

Combine the flours, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt in another large bowl, stirring with a whisk. Cut in chilled butter with a pastry blender, or you could use 2 knives, until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Fold in diced minced apples. Add buttermilk mixture, stirring just until moist.

Place dough onto a floured surface and knead lightly four times with floured hands. Form dough into an 9-inch circle onto baking sheet, about 3/4" thick. Using a knife, cut dough into 12 wedges all the way through.
Bake until golden, about 18-20 minutes, depending on your oven. Place on a cooling rack about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, to make the glaze: Mix powdered sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg with 2 tbsp of milk, adding 1/2 tbsp more (1 tsp at a time) if necessary to get the consistency to the right thickness. 

Place scones on parchment or wax paper and drizzle the glaze over the scones using a spoon - or- place the glaze in a shallow bowl and dip the top of the scones into the glaze, then let it sit on the waxed paper to harden.