Another pear recipe today… I modified this recipe from baked by an introvert. I have cheated a bit and just used chai tea bags rather than adding the spices individually. This gives the scones an additional tea leaf flecked appearance, and they taste just as good.
Ingredients:
2 3/4 cups self-raising flour
1/3 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
contents of 4 Chai tea wit
Instructions:
In a food processor combine flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, chai tea and butter. Cut butter into dry ingredients until combined evenly.
Peal and core pears, and cut into squares approximately 1 cm cubes. place in a bowl and add dry ingredients on top. Add a cup of cultured buttermilk (or Greek yogurt works too, because lets face it, what are you more likely to have in your fridge?) and cream. Combine until mixture comes together. Kneed dough a few times and form into a ball. Chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.
While chilling the dough, preheat oven to 190°C (374°F).
Squash ball into about a 20 cm diameter circle and cut into 8 segments. Place scones on a greased tray and cook at 190°C (374°F) for 25 minutes or until browned. The original recipe calls for 400°F (204°C), in my oven this burns the bottom of the scones, so better to cook at a lower temp for a bit longer.
Cool scones and enjoy. They are great reheated with a bit of butter.
What the kids can do:
Hand washing: Don’t forget to get the kids (and grownups too of course) to wash their hands before you start. Little hands always seem to end up touching everything, including the ingredients. This is extra important given the current Covid-19 situation. For good 20 second hand wash, have them sing “happy birthday to me” twice.
Eggs: Pro tip for breaking eggs with a 4 year old, break eggs into a separate glass bowl before adding to your other ingredients. That way you can see and pick out any bits of shell before they are added in by mistake. I like to use free range eggs, because it is kinder to the chickens, and they also taste better. Bear in mind that raw eggs can carry Salmonella so wash little hands if they end up the raw egg. I also don’t recommend eating raw cake batter, just in case.
Mixing the ingredients: My daughter (age 4) helped mix all the dry ingredients in the food processor. Bear in mind that little hands can fit down the shoot of the food processor, so always supervise this step. Miss four had a go at pealing the pears (being careful of fingers!), then I finished the pealing and cored the pears. My daughter then cut the pears up with a butter knife (for safety) and quickly got sidetracked wanting to eat them. But hey, 5+ a day, I will call that a win! We had to do an extra two pears this time, as two got eaten.
The biggest messes seen to happen when sifting and mixing dry ingredients with the kids. A great tip from reader Dana M is to put a towel down underneath, which catches any stray ingredients for easy cleaning. When fold wet into dry ingredients, you want to mix thoroughly, but not too much or the scones go flat and tough, this usually requires the grown up to either finish off the mixing and/or intervene before things are mixed too much.
Keeping Them Occupied 