Xak’s Original Recipe: Banana Scones for Tea Time (Whisk-y Business #1)

When looking ahead for what national food days are coming up, April 17th stood out to my Doughn (Dani) and me: National Banana Day. We had to celebrate because banana is a pretty common ingredient found in sweet and savory dishes. My first thought was celebrating this day with a new overnight oats recipe.

National Banana Day Ideas

Banana Overnight Oats

Within the last 2 years I have found myself making more overnight oats using rolled oatmeal, milk, and banana as a base. The addition of other ingredients can create endless combinations to adjust flavors. I usually toss in some cinnamon and a splash of vanilla. I have done overnight oats with cocoa powder with peanut butter, crushed blueberries, pumpkin, and sweet potato. The options are endless and I have found myself making use of any ingredient that may be leftover from a previous meal.

Banana Bread

However, I didn’t want overnight oats to be my method for celebrating National Banana Day. I was more in the mood to bake a treat. Banana bread is another go-to for me and many other bakers with very ripe bananas leftover from previous week’s groceries. There are wondrous additions for banana bread as well. Chocolate chip banana bread is delicious and a winning combination. Sweet potato banana bread is a fall dish I have enjoyed once or twice. I could experiment with other potential winning combinations for a banana bread treat, but banana bread did not have as much of a special kick to it either. It had to be something else, something that screams me, something like …a scone!

The Banana Scone

My vision of a banana scone would be different from the coffee-scone style seen in several coffee shops. The typical coffee-scone style has a triangle shape and usually has an icing glaze or sugar coating on top. I was thinking more along the lines of a tea scone. A banana tea scone with an accompanying jam to spread on top. This would mean a scone on the less sweet side to allow a delicious spread on top to bring out the banana flavor. 

I started browsing the internet for tea banana scones. There were a few banana scones that could fit my goal, but none hit the mark in my opinion, so I set out on a mission. A whisk-y business mission: to create my own tea banana scone recipe!

The Banana Scone For Tea Time

I looked back at previous scone recipes I have made. English cream scones is the typical scone recipe I follow for making a scone for afternoon tea. That recipe had flexibility for adding solid finishing ingredients such as the typical currants, which I omit most of the time in my English Cream scone, or chocolate chips to make the scone have a sweet and delectable bite. This base recipe would not do for banana though. I know if I would prepare the English cream scone with a banana, the dryness of the base recipe would clash with the mushiness of the banana when added in. This recipe needed to be based on a recipe using a wet ingredient instead. Bananas themselves are not necessarily wet but would fall into the category of “wet ingredients” when it comes to a recipe such as banana bread. 

I browsed our recipe archives and came across the carrot cake scones. This was more along the lines of what I was looking for. Carrots themselves again are not necessarily a liquid or would fall under the category of “wet ingredients,” but the carrot cake recipe required grating carrots, which does bring out the water inside the vegetable. When dealing with wet ingredients such as this the scone dough becomes more mushy and difficult to knead when working with it. The typical English cream scone recipe is more of a dry dough and easier to knead on the counter top. This is no surprise because the ratio of wet-to-dry ingredients are lower in English cream scones. I know my challenge would be finding that golden ratio, where I can have a dough dry enough to work either while kneading, but wet enough to allow for enough mashed bananas to be mixed in to give that banana flavor.

Banana Scone Attempt #1

My first attempt included the below ingredients:

• 1.5 cup flour
• 0.5 oats
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ½  cup of butter
• ½ cup of half + half
• ⅓  cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 cold bananas
• 1 egg white

I started with using my new food processor to blitz the dry ingredients: flour, oats, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. I wanted the texture from the oats but not end up with an oatmeal breakfast bar like treat where each bite is ALL oats. Aside with finding the balance of wet-to-dry ingredients, I also needed to find the right amount of salt and cinnamon. A large range of recipes leverage a dash of salt up to ½ teaspoon. Taking hints from the English cream scone recipe as well as reminding myself that this scone won’t be on the super-sweet side, I decided to go with 1 teaspoon of salt. The salt would bring out the sweetness of the banana, the sugar and the jam spread that will go with the scone.

The next step was to incorporate another ingredient that can be found in several scone recipes: butter. Not in a typical English cream scone, of course, but a blueberry scone or chocolate scone would make use of the butter. The carrot cake scone recipe also called for cold butter so I knew I would not be too out of line for using butter in my banana scone. The butter would help with the flakiness and flavor. Using chilled butter I cut it into pea-sized pieces. Letting my food processor do most of the work again, I tossed the butter bits into the dry ingredients and let the food processor go just for a few seconds. I did not want to completely grind up the butter, but enough so it was incorporated and fully covered by the dry ingredients.  

I then needed to decide on the wet ingredient mixture. Heavy cream was the first dairy product that came to mind but turns out I had already went through all of the heavy cream since our last grocery run. I had to think of a substitute. I went with half and half instead which is not the ideal substitute due to the fat content being much lower than that of heavy cream. It was at this point that I added another goal to this whisk-y business bake: The recipe should rely on the ingredients that are more commonly found in a kitchen towards the end of the week. We already have the leftover bananas as the star. The other ingredients such as flour, oats, cinnamon, butter, etc. are typically found in many American homes. If you are an enjoyer of treats such as Doughn and I, then you may also find yourself picking up a pint of half-and-half on a grocery run every week as well for coffee or tea (if you take your coffee/tea with creamer, of course) to go with said treat. This further reinforced my drive to leverage half and half in this banana scone recipe.

We cannot forget about our main ingredient we are celebrating: banana. I decided this ingredient should be chilled in the fridge for roughly 20 minutes. The goal was not to leave the banana in the fridge for too long because it would come out dark brown and mute the banana flavor too much (I think). So just leaving the banana in the fridge for 20-25 minutes was enough to make sure when mixing, it would not become a complete mushy state. In a separate bowl, I mixed the vanilla , the half and half, and brown sugar and set the mixture aside. The banana slices came next. I gently mixed the banana with the dry ingredients first taking care not to completely smash the banana slices as I wanted some banana chunks left.

Combining it all

I poured half of the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and started to stir. The dough at this point was very wet. If I ran a spoon through the middle, the dough would just stay in two halves. I then added the second half of the dry ingredients praying that the dough would become more solid. I mixed the dough more and more but it was no use. I had a dough the consistency of chocolate chip cookies. It was too wet to work with on the counter as I wanted to knead it just for a few minutes. I began to add a few tablespoons of flour. Mix, mix, mix, add more flour. Repeat. It was no use. At this point the dough was not going to let me knead it. In an attempt to salvage the dough, I poured it into a cupcake tin and attempted to bake it. Oh my, what have I done. These frankenstein’s monster of a banana muffin-scone hybrid were no good. After letting them bake all the way through in the oven for 20 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit I let them cool completely. I broke one in half and it crumbled. Not “crumble” like a delicious cookie kind-of “crumble” the muffin-scone hybrid “crumbled” as in fell apart in tiny pieces. The dough probably was not well incorporated in my attempt to add flour towards the end of the preparation phase. And the center was still way too wet, because I was left with a disc of dark batter that was baked but by no means was the consistency of a scone, muffin, or anything of the sorts.

I had to start from scratch. 😞

Banana Scone Attempt #2

Taking notes from my last bake, I cranked up the amount of flour I was going to add from the beginning, up to two cups. I also decided to add more oats as a way to counter the wet ingredients. I wanted more cinnamon flavor coming through in my banana scone, so I also decided to make it ½ tablespoon of cinnamon versus 1 teaspoon. The half and half had to come down to ¼ cup. I know half and half is difficult to bake with and it comes down to the fat-content of this wet ingredient. I was hoping the butter would help balance the wet-to-dry ingredients but alas that was not the case in the first attempt. You can also see how low the viscosity of half and half is compared to heavy cream. 

It was only a matter of time my love for chemistry would make an appearance in one of these baking blog posts. I did love chemistry a lot back in school and it may be one of the reasons I love to bake. As many people describe baking, it really does boil down to simply chemistry. Take a cup of half and half versus a cup of heavy cream, when you tilt the cup of half and half and then tilt it back and in another direction the liquid moves quicker from side to side. When performing the same step with heavy cream, the cream moves a little slower and also leaves residue on the side of the glass it is moving away from. 

Anyway, back to baking! I cut back on one more ingredient that I was unsure I should have: the banana. I used 2 large sized bananas but I decided to even cut that down to just 1 medium sized banana. I had the fear that my banana scone would not taste enough like banana, but because there really only is vanilla and some cinnamon in this recipe I did not think it would be possible to lose the banana flavor all that much.

I adjusted the quantity of my ingredients and began with mixing the dry ingredients in the food processor just like last time. My tiny food processor can only hold about four cups total of ingredients at one time so it struggled to keep all the flour, oats, and butter contained but I made it work. I whisked my wet ingredients together in a separate bowl and added my chilled banana all the same. I started mix in the dry ingredients with the wet. After mixing it all together there was a big sigh of relief as the dough actually came together like a scone dough! Now, yes this dough was a little more wet than a English cream scone dough of a sandwich bread dough but it can work with this.

Knead it!

I generously floured my counter tops. I also coated my rolling pin with flour as well. I turned the dough on the surface and it was a manageable consistency to work with as I kneaded it for four minutes. I rolled the dough out and used my usual 2 inch round fluted biscuit cutters. I was able to make a total of 16 mini scones with this recipe. 

Chill and Bake it!

I wanted to take one final note out of the carrot cake scone recipe and that was to chill the scone dough in the freezer for about 15 minutes. I proceeded with making the egg wash with a combination of 2 teaspoons of water and egg white from one egg. After brushing the scone dough with the egg wash, into the oven they went for 400 degrees Fahrenheit and 15 minutes. I had to check the dough two times and ended up letting them bake for 22 minutes. They cooled on a wire rack for several minutes before I opted to try one. I separated the banana scone in half as one would do with a typical English cream scone. The inside was nice and soft while the outside was crisp enough to pass as a scone bake versus how the soft, spongy consistency you would get from a muffin. After biting into it I had a pleasant smile on my face. The banana came through with a hint of cinnamon. The banana flavor was not lost as I had worried about with using one banana, rather it was an ideal amount of banana I wanted from a tea scone.

Jam it!

I had to think about what spread would go best with this new whisk-y business scone. I could have a thin layer of peanut butter to go with it as I do love the peanut butter and banana combination. That did not fit the afternoon tea theme I was going for so I started to browse through what jam flavors we had on hand. Blueberry, raspberry, strawberry and …pineapple? Hmm this could work in my favor. I started thinking about a tropical theme and how banana and pineapple would pair quite nicely. I grabbed the clearance pineapple jam off the shelf of my pantry (funny enough it was a flavor that our local grocery store was having trouble selling but at one point I had looked at and grabbed for myself knowing there would be a day this specific jam flavor would come in handy). Taking the butter knife I spread the pineapple jam on one half of the banana scone, after taking a bite I was convinced I found my banana scone!

After being satisfied with my recipe I had to share it with my Doughn. She was very pleased with the taste as well, which made me happy it was not only me who found a great combination of ingredients to make an atypical scone flavor. So there we say with our cups of tea with banana scone and pineapple jam on National Banana Day, pleased with the effort I spent last night coming up with the recipe.

Recipe: Xak’s Banana Scones for Tea Time

Ingredients

• 2 cups of flour
• 3/4 cup oats
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• ½  tablespoon cinnamon
• ½  cup of cold butter, cut into small chunks
• ¼  cup of half + half
• ⅓  cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cold banana, chopped
• 1 egg
• 1 egg white (for egg wash)
• 2 tsps of water

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Farenheit.
2. Put the flour, oats, baking powder, kosher salt, and cinnamon into a food processor and blitz to combine.
3. Add chunks of butter and brown sugar into food processor and blitz until combined.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk together the half + half, vanilla, and 1 egg.
5. Add chopped cold banana into bowl and lightly mix.
6. Combine the dry ingredients from the food processor with the wet ingredients until it forms a wet dough.
7. Generously flour surface and knead dough for four minutes.
8. Roll dough out and use a 2 inch round (or fluted) biscuit cutter to cut out 16 mini scones.
9. Place scones on a parchment lined baking sheet.
10. Put baking sheet into the freezer for 15 minutes.
11. Whisk 1 egg white and 2 tsps of water to make egg wash.
12. Remove chilled scones from freezer and brush tops with egg wash.
13. Bake in oven for 20-22 minutes, until golden brown.
14. Serve scones with jam or peanut butter and enjoy with a cup of tea!