tea with amanda

My friend Amanda the baker had me over for tea. She's currently nesting in her parent's guest house with her fiancee, Adam the actor/playwright. We've been friends for six years and I've never seen her yard. It's like The Secret Garden fell to disrepair in suburban Los Angeles, by which I mean it's the most romantic little yellow house I've ever had the privilege to visit. She has an industrial stainless steel sink and a dozen fruit trees growing outside. I adore it.

She asked me if I wanted a scone and I said yes, of course, assuming that she had some lying around. Instead, she took out a mixing bowl and set to making me a fresh batch of Meyer Lemon Strawberry Scones. Charmingly amorphous and lightly fragrant, they were perfect with blood orange marmalade and our loose leaf Earl Grey/rose tea mixture on a Wednesday afternoon in her new home.

MEYER LEMON STRAWBERRY SCONES

Preheat your oven to 350.

In a bowl, combine:
1/2 cup sugar
zest of 3 Meyer lemons
and rub together with your fingertips until the sugar is fragrant with the oils of the zest.

Add:
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tblsp baking powder
3 cups all purpose flour
and toss together with your hands.

Add 8 ounces of cold butter, cut into cubes and use the pad of your thumb to push the cubes of butter against the base of your forefinger into long flakes that look like giant fish scales. The motion is like a slow, deliberate, forceful version of the hand gesture that normally means "cash" when done quickly and repetitively. Do this fairly quickly and don't worry about making all of them perfect. The goal is to have long flaky bits of cool butter in your dough that will melt and steam in the oven, creating long flaky pockets of buttery goodness in your dough.

When all of the butter has had this done to it, add

1 cup of buttermilk

and

2 cups of diced strawberries
and fold together gently with your hands. Scoop out half-cup portions of dough onto a prepared baking sheet, a couple inches apart, and push down into roundish blobs. Brush with a little bit of beaten egg, garnish with slices of lemon or strawberry, and sprinkle with sugar.

Bake until they lift easily off the tray and are deeply golden brown and fragrant and lovely.

Depending on your oven, this could be anywhere from twenty five minutes to a bit more than half an hour.