Scones with Plum Jam and Clotted Cream

Radio Four last week were tweeting about making the perfect scones. Scones are something I never feel like I have mastered. My Mum makes amazing ones, she has even shared her recipe with me but to no avail. I could just never get them to rise properly. When I saw that Radio 4 had come up with the perfect scone recipe I just had to try it especially as my plum jam needed testing out.

Mr VST and I cycled for two hours on Sunday and there happened to be some clotted cream in the village shop where we stopped for a drink. I thought it was a sign so I bought it and when we came home I went to make some scones. 

The first problem I encountered was having no milk. Well I did have some but it was frozen and I didn't want to wait for it to thaw properly before making scones. I decided that I would have to mess with the perfect scone recipe and use soya milk curdled with a teaspoon of cider vinegar in place of the milk, like a non-dairy buttermilk.

The recipe worked well even with my amendment. The scones were light and melted in the mouth. They went well with the clotted cream and plum jam too and it didn't seem to matter whether they were topped the Cornish way....

...or the Devonshire way.

You may be able to tell from these photos that the plum jam was rather runny which is why I reboiled it and added some lemon and liquid pectin, sadly you now have to slice the jam rather than pour it!

Plum Jam with Cinnamon

I bought the River Cottage Handbook No 2: Preserves hoping to make more than a few jars of jam this year. One of Mr VST's colleagues had a glut of plums and he brought home two kilos last week. I had planned to make plum jam, plumbeena and plum leather too. 

Unfortunately the plums had been left a little too long and so I had to throw quite a few away so I needed more to make the jam and there wasn't enough to start on the plumbeena or leather and I didn't have any apples for the fruit leather anyway. The plum jam recipe in the book suggested cracking a few of the stones and blanching the kernels to give an almond like flavour. They smelled amazing.

Another tip was to add a couple of cinnamon sticks to the mix which I did.

Jams always use a shocking amount of sugar and in this case the recipe said to use granulated sugar rather than jam sugar so I did.

I let it all bubble away for absolutely ages and I couldn't get up to temperature partly because the pan wasn't big enough. I eventually got it up to temperature and bottled it up.

Mr VST and I tried out some of the jam on some home made scones. It was absolutely delicious, I couldn't taste the kernels but the cinnamon gave the jam a real depth of flavour. Unfortunately it didn't set at all and ran right off the scones. Mr VST went and got me some liquid pectin today and after much searching around I worked out how much to add to the jam. I added some lemon juice and pectin and boiled the jam up again, in smaller batches this time. 

It set almost immediately - eek! I may have added too much pectin. Oh well, it was very nice on a bit of toast this evening. I'm not too impressed that the first recipe that I made from the book didn't work. I hope the rest are better.