Banana Bread Scones

Ingredients

• All-purpose flour.
• Baking powder. This gives our banana scones that extra fluffy rise.
• Brown sugar. The molasses in brown sugar mixes well with the bananas and maple, but you can substitute white granulated sugar instead.
• Spices. Cinnamon and nutmeg enhance the banana flavor.
• Unsalted butter.
• Buttermilk. This is my preference for scones. Some use heavy cream or milk, but I love the tender qualities buttermilk provides.
• Egg. This is the difference between a biscuit and a scone, the egg provides the additional structure making scones a bit sturdier.
• Super-ripe bananas. And I do mean super-ripe for the best flavor. Grab your mushiest bunch.
• Walnuts. A classic addition to banana bread!

Let’s not overlook the glaze. Glazes are always a completely optional choice, but it really makes the scones shine (literally!)

• Pure maple syrup.
• Confectioners’ sugar.
• Cinnamon.

How to make the perfect scone

Scones are not only easy to make, requiring no mixers or fancy equipment, but they are also fun to get your hands a little messy and smash some dough around. Find a few tips below to make sure you have the best banana nut scones you can!

Use super-ripe bananas. To make a great banana bread, you really need to use the mushiest bananas you can find. The sugars, texture, and flavor, all depends on the bananas used. See notes below if you don’t have any on hand.

Make a shaggy dough. It’s a funny name, but a shaggy dough refers to the texture of the scone dough once the buttermilk is added. Exactly how much buttermilk you need to achieve a “shaggy” dough may differ depending on the day, the humidity, your flour, etc. You are looking for a sticky and craggy dough but not an overly wet or sloppy dough.

Fun story! When I worked in a commercial kitchen setting making the same dough mix every day, the buttermilk needed would range from needing a 1/2 quart to a full quart and anywhere in-between for a batch. It really does differ!

Avoid over working the dough. Once you have your perfectly shaggy dough, you do not need to knead or mix further. This is not a loaf of bread! Simply turn out onto a lightly floured surface and pat into the desired shape. If you have any crumbles left in the bowl, you can fold the dough a few times to incorporate all the last bits of flour. But stop there!

Use cold ingredients. Scones get their lift from the baking powder, but they also get their flakiness from how the dough is made. Using cold flakes of butter will create steam when they go into the oven. The steam creates little pockets of air that translates into flakes when they bake!

Cold vs. Frozen Butter

This recipe calls for cubes of cold butter to be rubbed into the flour to create a clumpy texture.

Why don’t I use the frozen, grated method for butter that others prefer? I have tried this method and, well, I don’t think it works very well … and it’s much harder to do than rubbing in cold butter!

Grating frozen butter isn’t really that easy, and by the time you grate a full stick of butter, it’s basically defrosted anyway (tiny pieces of grated food don’t take very long to defrost!) Plus, you lose the larger pockets of butter to create the big flakes. So I skip this hack and stay with my old method.

Here’s where it is handy, if you are someone who lacks hand strength for any variety of reasons, and find mixing the butter in by hand to be difficult, grating frozen butter in a food processor is a great workaround!