Cheese Scones

Cheese scones are perfect warm with a bit of butter instead of bread with soup or have them cold with some cream cheese and tomato.

Put 50g cold butter cut into cubes into 300g self-raising flour mixed with 1 tsp mustard powder, 1 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper into a large bowl.

Rub the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Grate 150g mature Cheddar cheese into the flour mixture and mix them together.

Beat together 2 eggs and 6 tbsp buttermilk.

Then pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix gently to form a rough dough – it is important at this stage to be gentle and sparing with your mixing as the dough (and therefore the scones) will get tough if they are over mixed.

Roll out to about 2.5 cm thick if you are making quite big scones or a little thinner if you are making smaller scones (mine were quite small – about 4cm in diameter).  You can re-roll the scraps of dough but again be gentle when squashing the dough back together.

Place on a baking sheet and brush the top of each scone with a little milk and a sprinkling of cayenne pepper.  You could also put a little more grated cheese on the top if you wanted.

Bake at 200C (fan) for 10-15 minutes until risen and golden.  Cool on a wire rack.