Saturday's scones

Yesterday was a bit of a weird day feeding wise. Breakfast was reasonably normal (although Matt doesn't usually make a fire in the toaster) and then we decided to go out for a walk. But we didn't plan the walk very well from a catering perspective. Matt had packed one packet of prawn cocktail crisps which he ate within about 10 minutes of leaving the car park. So three and half hours later we were pretty hungry.

We had purchased some cut price sardines the previous evening and the plan for lunch was to have these cooked on the barbeque (apparently this is not the correct spelling but I prefer it). Since it was outdoors cooking Matt was in charge. It would theoretically have been a quick process but

• We had to get a barbeque fish cooking implement – the first place we tried had sold out of nearly everything barbeque related but we were successful at our second detour
• Although apparently the fish were gutted they needed quite a bit of fettling up before they met Matt's strict culinary requirements. This involved cleaning and stuffing with lemon and capers.

So it was nearly 6pm by the time we ate our lunch (we had had a snack of mushroom paté on crackers). It was delicious but we weren't going to want a big meal later on (I had planned to make a curry); instead Matt persuaded me to make some scones. This would be a nice way to conclude our Devon day. These were going to be sour cream scones (since I had some cut price sour cream to use up) but I fancied something savoury so deviated somewhat and embarked upon some cheese scones.

This would finally give me a chance to use up the butter that smelt of cheese in something that it wouldn't matter if it tasted of cheese. Amazingly the recipe required 50g of butter and this is exactly how much I had left. I love it when things like this happen. I had 60g of very strong cheddar (I don't know where the other 340g has disappeared to so quickly), which was only 10g more than the recipe called for. I find that recipes tend to under cheese things so put it all in (after grating). I also added some un-reciped chives. I had been inspired to do this when Matt had asked me earlier if what was in the pot by the barbeque was chives. I don't know exactly how many chives I added, I suppose about 12 of average length chopped up small with scissors.

The recipe says to roll out the dough to 1cm thick but I find that it always sticks to the rolling pin so I just sorted of patted it out instead. And then it says to use your 6.5cm biscuit cutter, but I only have a 7cm or 6cm biscuit cutter so I chose the 6cm on the basis that more scones is better than bigger scones. They bake at the hottest the oven goes until risen and golden. I nearly forgot about them but was reminded by the smell of cooking and got back to them just in time, after about 10 minutes.

So that was our tea last night. I had one with butter substitute, then one with half yeast extract and half cream cheese with garlic and herbs, and then a final half with butter substitute. Personally I think they could have done with more cheese (even though I did use what purports to be very strong cheddar) but Matt described them as pleasantly cheesey. We had another one each for breakfast this morning. And then one more as a mid-morning snack. Scones taste best fresh so it would have been wasteful if we hadn't eaten them up.