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Maple Moon Scones.

Mother’s Day has come and gone, but Carolyn is such a cool Mom that she made these scones for us, her folks and friends for Sunday morning (don’t worry, Carolyn got a nice Mother’s Day dinner). She is indeed the perfect woman. And these scones are worthy of a special occasion. Big (huge, really), moist and with plenty of maple flavor, these are some serious scones. They do look like the moon, too. Cool.

The recipe comes from Ina Garten (the Barefoot Contessa), although Carolyn adapted a number of ingredients, including some oat flour, date sugar and maple essence for deeper flavor. But the standard Ina Garten formula of ~~scads~~ lots of butter and buttermilk stays the same. Ina never met a buttery scone or shortbread she didn’t like. But if you are baking from scratch, the recipe may as well work. And butter does make everything better. Add some real maple syrup and it is hard to go wrong.

And it truly is hard to go wrong here. This recipe is “scone 101”, plus some extra glaze. Mix dry ingredients, add in cold butter, mix the wet ingredients and add to the dry, roll, cut and bake. The glaze is super-easy as well, if you can stir, you will have glaze. So if your waistline can take it (or if you have hungry kids), you can make these scones whenever you like.

Even better, you can cut the scones from the raw dough and refrigerate them for a few days without any loss of quality. So if you want scones during the week, make the dough and then bake the scones as needed. But you may as well cook the full batch, your crew will certainly eat them, and your friends will be happy if you share.

Finally, love and thanks to Carolyn from the boys and I. We are truly blessed to have her, and we are eternally grateful.

Maple Moon Scones:

(Adapted from Ina Garten)

Notes Before You Start:

It is best to dice the butter first, and then put it back into the fridge until ready to use.

Also a good idea to measure and mix the wet ingredients first, and also store in the fridge until use. It keep everything colder, longer.

This is a sticky dough- use lots of flour on your surface and on your hands.

What You Get: Big, awesome scones with serious maple flavor.

What You Need: A stand mixer really helps here. No other special equipment required.

How Long? About an hour.

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Building your own recipes often creates some strange bedfellows. In this case, we developed a recipe based on the work of two cooking titans from very different places in the culinary spectrum: David Chang and Ina Garten. Chang is the bad-boy New York City chef of Momofuku fame, known for excellent, innovative Asian-inspired comfort food that is uniquely upscale and downscale at the same time (a tough balance to pull-off, btw). Chang is also known for extreme profanity, the occasional tirade and the pursuit of perfection. Ina Garten, better known as the Barefoot Contessa, is a Food Network staple, former Hamptons caterer and cookbook author who is best known for simplifying classic recipes and coolly saying “now, how easy is that”. I doubt they often share afternoon tea.

Actually, I have no idea if they know each other, or how they feel about the other’s work. But I will tell you that they have very different approaches to cooking- and their cookbooks bear this out. Chang’s “Momofuku Cookbook” has some very easy recipes, like pork belly, but is also full of multi-step, hard-to-find / make ingredients and sometimes highly technical cooking. The Momofuku cookbook, not surprisingly, reads like it was written by a chef. But happily, we do get some incredibly tasty, and easy recipes for the home cook like roasted pork belly. It is a great dish and anyone can make it. And it is really, really good. I have (very happily) had pork belly at Momofuku Ssam Bar and the home version competes very nicely. It is porky, soft, fatty, salty and incredibly indulgent. Yum. Double Yum.

(Ed. Note: A few years ago, we had a take-out roasted pork shoulder from Momofuku as part of a Thanksgiving meal in New York with family and friends. It was one of the best, most memorable, meals we have ever had. I thank David Chang and his team, to this day, for helping that meal happen.)

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Maple Moon Scones

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