Easy Rhubarb Scones
The deer have driven me to utter desperation.
The recipe
Don’t worry; only the rhubarb leaves are poisonous; the stalks are perfectly safe to eat! These scones are perfect for beginners. If you over-knead or over-bake, they’ll forgive you.
Yield: 12–16 scones
Time: 45 mins
Ingredients
Rhubarb
1 c (120 g) rhubarb, chopped (¼-inch pieces)
2 tbsp (28 g) sugar
Scones
2 c (250 g) flour
6 tbsp (83 g) sugar
1 tbsp (14 g) baking powder
¼ tsp salt
1 stick (113 g or 8 Tbsp) salted butter, fridge-cold and cubed
½ c (120 g) heavy cream
Instructions
1. Prepare to bake: Preheat the oven to 425°F. Line a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper or Silpat. Lightly flour a clean 1 sq ft section of your countertop.
2. Toss the rhubarb with 2 tbsp of the sugar in a small bowl. Set aside for 10 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
4. Add the cubed butter to the dry ingredients. Using a pastry cutter, cut the butter into the flour until the largest pieces of butter are the size of peas. (If you don’t have a pastry cutter, you can do this by gently rubbing the butter in with your fingertips instead.)
5. Discard any liquid the rhubarb gave off, then add the rhubarb pieces to the flour mixture and toss until coated.
6. Add the heavy cream and stir the dough until almost combined, with some dry bits remaining. Then, turn the dough out onto your floured surface and knead just until it looks uniform.
7. Shape the dough into a 1-inch thick circle and cut it into 12 wedges.
8. Place the scones on the baking sheet, spacing them an inch apart.
9. Brush the tops of the scones with a little heavy cream, then sprinkle them generously with sugar.
10. Bake 12–14 minutes, until the top edges just turn golden brown. Remove them from the oven and let them cool on the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack.
11. Enjoy warm!
12. If you don’t eat all the scones the day they are baked, freeze them. Reheat them in a 400°F oven for 5–10 minutes or until they’re warmed through in the middle.
Notes and tips
The butter should be cold from the fridge. The colder your ingredients, the flakier the scones will be.
Tossing the rhubarb with sugar does two things: it sweetens it (rhubarb alone is very sour) and encourages the rhubarb to give off some water before baking, preventing soggy scones.
The secret to tender scones is not kneading the dough too much. You want to work it just until everything comes together.
If you want smaller scones, shape the dough into a 1-inch thick square and cut it into 16 pieces. Bake for 11–13 minutes.
If you want to swap out the rhubarb for another ingredient, choose an equally juicy fruit. This recipe uses less heavy cream to compensate. If you want to use a nut or a dried fruit in your scones, use my pistachio scone recipe as your base instead.
The story
I’ve been fighting a war with the stupid deer for years. I’ve tried planting deer-resistant flowers (that’s a lie—deer will eat almost anything around here), spraying my entire garden with a substance that reeks of garlic, hot peppers, and rotten eggs (only effective when it’s not raining), and I put up a very tall, very expensive fence, which I thought would be the final solution. Two weeks after the fence was finished, the deer nearly obliterated my pea plants. Turns out the four-legged pests can jump very high.
The only real solution to the problem? Growing poisonous plants, like daffodils and larkspur. Deer leave those alone, no matter how hungry they are. I found out this spring that rhubarb (the leaves only; the stalks are perfectly safe to eat) were in that category.
I remembered rhubarb from when I was a kid. My grandmother made an excellent pie with it, so when I saw it in the grocery store, I bought a ton of it and made scones that night.
Turns out few people bake with rhubarb by itself, and for good reason: it’s very sour and very juicy, which I found out when the scones were sticky in the middle and made you pucker every time you bit a piece of rhubarb. But I was determined to make this work. I desperately wanted to plant something that would stand up to the deer.
I kept trying. I macerated the rhubarb with sugar before baking it to draw out some of its juices. I increased the sugar in the scones to compensate for the rhubarb’s sourness. I decreased the amount of heavy cream so that the scones weren’t soggy. It worked in the end. The final batch of scones were lightly sweet and sour, moist and fluffy inside, and so flavorful they didn’t need jam. And as the cherry on top, the scones were so moist that even a little over-kneading or over-baking wouldn’t harm them, making this an absolutely perfect recipe for beginner bakers.
Next year, I’m planting as much rhubarb as I can.
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This recipe sounds excellent! I love the inspiration being planting naturally deer resistant plants. But is it true they leaped the fence? That’s just a travesty.