The Crooked Scone

If I were to open a bakery, I'd have to call it the Sunken Loaf. Or maybe the Crooked Scone. And if I did open a bakery, it would have a playground for babies to play in so adults could enjoy their baked goods in peace and quiet and babies would have somewhere to burn off some energy during the cold, cold winters (it's below zero here today; boo!). Then maybe people would come for the atmosphere and not notice so much that my baked goods have .... personality?

Assembled ingredients for scones

I'm pretty proud this week. After 2 months (from Halloween to Christmas) of eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted - resulting in an 11 lb weight gain! - I got back on the Weight Watchers band wagon and tracked, tracked, tracked my points. This week I lost 2.8 lbs! Still a long way to go to get rid of holiday weight, and even farther to go to get rid of pregnancy weight (yes, a year later, I'm still toting it around....), but I know from experience that success breeds success.

All stirred up

So, when I had a hankerin' for baking today (did I mention it's below zero with the wind chill??), I knew just what to make. I've followed Gina at Skinnytaste for some time. Made several of her dinner dishes, and only attempted one baked good - and it didn't turn out! So, I swore to stay away from "skinny" baked goods for good. But, this recipe. Looked SO good. Looked like good-sized pieces.  Low points values (for a baked good). All ingredients I had on hand. Perfect!

Skinny Buttermilk Chocolate Chip Scones
recipe from skinnytaste.com

Ready to knead

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup cold buttermilk
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup all purpose flour (Bob's Red Mill)
• 1 cup white whole wheat flour (Bob's Red Mill)
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp chilled butter (must be cold) cut into small pieces
• 3/4 cup chocolate chips
• cooking spray
• 1 large egg white, lightly beaten
• 1 1/2 tbsp sugar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375°. Combine the first four ingredients in a medium bowl, stirring with a whisk. Spray baking sheet with cooking spray.
Combine flour, baking powder, salt, in a large bowl, stirring with a whisk. Cut in chilled butter with a pastry blender, or you could use 2 knives, until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Gently fold in chocolate chips. Add milk mixture, stirring just until moist.
Place dough onto a floured surface and knead lightly four times with floured hands. Form dough into an 9-inch circle onto baking sheet, about 3/4" thick. Using a knife, cut dough into 12 wedges all the way through.

Brush

egg white over dough and sprinkle evenly with sugar.

Bake

until golden, about 18-20 minutes, depending on your oven.

Serve

warm.

First of all, I cut scone dough like I cut pizzas - uneven and crooked. Oh well. I guess some days I'll get a big scone and some days I'll get a small one.  It'll all even itself out.

Cut crookedly!

My scones are decent, but I wouldn't say I did a GREAT job making them. I've never made scones before, so I probably need to perfect my method. And probably - once again - follow the recipe a little better. Yes, I messed up again. I pulled my scones out of the oven and they are very flat, whereas Gina's are very raised. Lo and behold - I read the recipe wrong. I put in one TEAspoon of baking powder; it calls for one TABLEspoon. That probably makes a lot of difference, huh?

 Maybe my bakery should be called "Follow The Recipe" instead.

They taste fine; look a little weird. I think I'll try them - or a variation of scones - again someday. After I read and really pay attention to a few more recipes. :)

Hannah loved it, though. And why wouldn't she? She's only had chocolate a very small handful of chocolate a few times in her life. She probably was in baby baked good heaven!

Follow that recipe!

I did it again. Or should I say I DIDN'T do it again. If you'll recall from my last post, I sometimes don't read recipes all the way through. In fact, quite frequently I just read the ingredients and figure I know how to put it all together.

It sometimes leads to some odd results.

Yesterday I was hungry for chocolate. I am doing fairly good with the Weight Watchers (aside from the Noodles & Co. I ate for supper last night....), so I knew making the German Chocolate Cake mix as directed probably wasn't a good idea. Luckily, I follow SkinnyTaste and she's got a solution for everything bad for you. I found this recipe for cupcakes for 2 Points Plus per cupcake. You can't go wrong there, right


SkinnyTaste's 2 Point Cupcakes
Ingredients:

• 18.25 oz Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix
• 1.4 oz sugar free, fat free, instant chocolate pudding
• 1 cup canned pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
• 1 1/3 cups water

For the chocolate glaze:

• 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar
• 1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2-1 tbsp 1% milk
• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
• pinch of salt
  

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Line a cupcake tin with cupcake liners.

Combine pumpkin puree and water in a large bowl; mix to combine. Add chocolate pudding mix and mix well.
Add chocolate cake mix and beat 2 minutes.

Fill cupcake liners 2/3 full and bake about 25 - 28 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool in pan on wire rack for 15 minutes.

For the glaze: combine all dry ingredients, add vanilla and 1/2 tbsp milk, adding more 1/4 tsp at a time if needed until smooth.
Add to a piping bag or use a zip lock bag and cut the corner off, drizzle onto cooled cupcakes.

For your convenience, I bolded the part of the recipe that is apparently the key to delicious looking cupcakes... aka the part I did not follow. I should point out that I have no one to blame for my non-following ways but myself. Seriously. SkinnyTaste even has step-by-step PHOTOS showing you what to do. Oh dear. I need to pay more attention.

So, what I did was dump, stir, fill, bake. This is how they turned out:

Lumpy, bumpy, globs

This ishow they were SUPPOSED to turn out:

Shiny, moist, perfection

Mine taste great, but they just look ugly. I was going to take some to the neighbors, but I'm too embarrased. So I'll probably eat them all. It's only 48 Points to eat all 24 of them......

(And no, these aren't for babies, but I had a friend request I blog about my mis-adventure of the cupcakes. Sigh.)