Herb Scones

As promised, here is the recipe for my Herb Scones, which I made to go with the Chick Pea Curry - although actually, they'd probably go better with soup.

I adapted these from a recipe I found in the Mornflake Oat Cookbook. By the way, you will notice that a lot of books I reference are from the '80s - this is because I am raiding my Mum's recipe library from when my parents were vegetarian! Aside from the blandness and terrible pictures (they had really odd ideas about food presentation then, like wrapping cabbage leaves around things and serving soup inside carved-out melons) there are the seeds of some amazing dishes just waiting to be reinvented with a bit of modern zest - not to mention products like Quorn and dairy substitutes like that weren't around then. Oh yes, veganism has come a long way since the days when you'd just chuck a few chunks of tofu into a salad and call it 'feta'...

Anyway, despite the good-looking recipe, which uses oats as well as wholemeal flour, I wasn't that impressed with these scones. I tried making them twice, and although both times they were quite nice in a plain, homely sort of way to have on the side of your plate, they weren't anything special. I did discover afterwards that I had accidentally used baking powder instead of baking soda, so that may have had something to do with it, but I'm skeptical that this could have made such a significant difference to the taste.

But I promised I would post and document my experiments, so here goes:

Herb Scone Recipe

Ingredients:

• 75g Wholewheat Flour
• 25g Oat Flour (I made this myself by whizzing up some Scottish Porridge Oats in the blender. Not sure if this was the right method or the right kind of oats though!)
• 1 tsp/ 5ml Baking Soda
• 1 tsp/ 5ml Salt
• 1 tablespoon Fresh Chopped Herbs of your choice (I used Coriander) - or you could use dried herbs if you're stuck. Dried chives or mustard seeds might also be good.
• 40g Vegan Margarine Substitute (I use Vitalite)
• 75 ml Unsweetened Soya Milk (I used Sainsbury's)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 230°C/ 450°F/ Gas Mark 8.
2. Put the Wholewheat Flour, Oat Flour, Baking Soda and Salt in a bowl and mix.
3. Add the Vegan Marg and rub into the flour mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs (if you don't like getting marg all over your fingers and the feeling of the pastry going under your nails, you might want to use the 'two-fork' method - where instead of using your hands, you 'chop' the margerine into the flour using the forks).
4. Add the herbs and mix them lightly into the breadcrumb-like mixture.
5. Measure out the soya milk into a small jug or cup, and start to add it slowly while stirring until a soft dough is formed. Try to stop before the dough starts getting sticky - you don't have to use it all up!
6. On a lightly-floured surface, roll out the dough until it's about 1.5 cm thick and cut into rounds using a 5-cm pastry cutter - or you can just pull blobs off and flatten them into scone-ish shapes.
7. Place the scones onto a greased baking tray (I use a piece of tin foil sprayed with 'Fry Light'), brush them with the remaining soya milk or some extra marg and bake for around 10 mins.