blueberries & cream scones with lemon glaze

These are ultralight scones, studded with blueberries and cream cheese, and drizzled warm from the oven with a fresh lemon glaze. They’re a cheery breakfast on a dreary day – like when you’re hoping spring would just show up already!  As far as weekend breakfasts go, these don’t require extreme effort.

Just a quick turn with a pastry blender, some patting together with your hands, mixing with a few blueberries.

There may be a few blueberry casualties along the way. No worries. Just pat those scones out into a disk, cut into eighths, and bake.

Meanwhile, put together a quick glaze.  Lemon zest, powdered sugar, fresh lemon juice and a pat of butter.

If you’re really nice, you could serve breakfast in bed.

Or, you could just dig right in yourself.

blueberries and cream scones with fresh lemon glaze

adapted from Tyler Florence’s Real Kitchen

for the scones:

2 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, cold
2-3 oz cream cheese (use at least 2 oz and up to 3, if you’d like more)
1 cup whole milk*
1 cup fresh blueberries

for the lemon glaze:

zest of 1 lemon (or meyer lemon)
juice of 1 lemon** (or meyer lemon)
1 cup powdered sugar
½ Tbsp butter

Preheat the oven to 400ºF. Stir the flour, baking powder and salt in a mixing bowl. Add pieces of butter into the bowl, and blend in with a pastry blender until the butter is in very small pieces. Next, blend in pieces of the cream cheese, leaving some of the pieces unblended. (These will form nice little pockets of cream in the scones as they bake.) Add the milk, stir with a spoon until just incorporated. The mixture will be quite scraggly. You don’t want to overwork this dough. Dump in the blueberries and mix in with your hands. Turn the dough out onto the countertop and form a disc. Cut into eighths.

Place wedges on a baking sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes, until golden brown.

While scones are baking, put together the glaze: combine lemon zest, juice, powdered sugar and pat of butter. Zap in the microwave 30 seconds.

Let the scones cool for a few minutes after baking and drizzle with the glaze. These are best served warm. (If you don’t drizzle the extras with glaze, you can wrap them up and save them for the next day. Not quite as good, but I doubt anyone would turn one down.)

* 2% milk is fine; half & half is great.  Tyler’s recipe calls for heavy cream.  I don’t really think these require cream because the texture achieved with whole milk is just about the same.

** The juiciest lemons are the heaviest for their size.  Also, to extract the most juice from your lemon, give it all little roll on the counter before squeezing out the juice.