Le Bon Scone: Crème Brûlée Scones

I actually think Le Bon Scone would be a pretty good name for a scone blog…

As I’ve started brushing up my bonjours and enchantees in preparation for meeting the Official Taster’s French relatives at our wedding, I was inspired to use the flavours of France for my next scone recipe.

Previous dabblings into French sconery have included French Onion Soup Scones and the Fig Scones I made to eat with some delicious Pié d’Angloys, but this time I was wanted to try something a little more decadent: crème brûlée scones.

Having never actually made crème brûlée (why should I let that stop me?), I felt the need to do a little bit of research, or at least glance at a recipe. Doing so confirmed what I had thought/hoped, namely that the key ingredients in crème brulée are cream and sugar; I couldn’t go wrong.

I hadn’t used cream as a base ingredient in a scone before, although I had read about using it as a substitute for butter and milk. I used this recipe from the Telegraph, which promised me lighter scones than I’d ever known, and I added about a teaspoon of vanilla essence. I was a little disappointed that the recipe didn’t include eggs, as they’re obviously important in crème brûlée, i.e. they’re the ingredient that stops it being just vanilla-flavoured sugary cream (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

My plan was to sprinkle the tops of the scones with sugar, in the hope that it would ‘brûlée’ in the oven, but I needed to use a blowtorch once they came out to finish them off, which only led to one small scone fire. In fact, the one that looks a wee bit scorched in the picture above actually had the most authentic taste, with that smoky, very slightly bitter flavour of burnt sugar.

Truthfully, these scones were amazing, and made it immediately to my list of top five scones (which I don’t actually have but am considering making just so I can put these on there). I generally prefer savoury scones to sweet ones, and cheese scones to any other kind, but these were delicious. With the vanilla and sugar, they tasted like cupcakes, but without the need for lashings of icing to make them interesting. They were light and fluffy, just like the recipe promised, with a sweet, crispy topping to contrast the crumbliness. And, out of respect to my wedding diet, I made them with a low-fat cream impersonator; imagine how good they’d be with full-fat double cream.

Bake these. Bake them now.