Makes 8 scones
Put the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and baking soda in a food processor and mix.
Cut the cold butter into cubes and add to the food processor. Blitz for a few minutes until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs and there are no butter lumps left. Put into a large mixing bowl, add the cheddar and refrigerate for a moment.
Set aside 8 small wild garlic leaves to decorate the scones later. Roughly chop the rest and put in a mini food processor with the buttermilk. Whizz until the wild garlic is chopped and you can still see little pieces.
Take the flour mix out of the fridge and add the buttermilk. Bring the dough gently together by cutting through it with a knife (the dough won’t stick as much to a knife as to a spoon). Once most of the dough is moist, bring together the dough gently with your hands, so that it holds together but it’s not necessarily an even ball – don’t overknead it to keep a fluffy texture.
Cover the bowl with a towel and set the dough aside to rest for 15 minutes.
Take the dough out of the bowl and turn it onto a lightly floured surface. Gently roll out to a 3 cm thickness.
Cut out disks with a round 7cm cookie cutter and put the scones on a baking tray lined with baking paper.
Reshape the remaining dough to a ball, roll out and cut out more scones – you will get 8 in total.
Let the scones rest for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180°C fan.
When ready to bake, brush the scones with beaten egg and decorate with a small wild garlic leaf, brushing the leaf with more egg.
Bake in the preheated oven for 17 minutes until lightly browned.
Put the baked scones onto a wire rack and leave to cool for about 10 minutes until serving.
NOTES:
• These are best eaten warm after they come out of the oven. If serving from cold: You can reheat them in a 150°C oven for 10 minutes or cut them open and toast them. (They do taste good cold too at a picnic)
• Usually scones are eaten with butter. If you want to spread something else on them, I’d recommend some cream cheese (plain, or if you feel like it you can fold through some chopped herbs, including wild garlic and a little grating of lemon zest)
*Baking soda can be found in Luxembourg as ‘Natron’. It is similar to baking powder and often used in bakes that are made with yoghurt or buttermilk. If you don’t have any baking soda at hand, you can replace it with baking powder.
