Cranberry Scones

Ever since The Royal Wedding and my watch group's city-wide hunt for clotted cream (multiple stores sold out!) I've been craving more scones. My mom picked up the "Tried and True" cookbook from the Southmoreland on the Plaza B&B in Kansas City, and there's a great simple recipe for cranberry scones in there. It's pretty basic -- flour, butter, cream, almond and vanilla extracts and dried cranberries. I'm a sucker for anything with butter and almond extract, and I love how it help keeps baked goods tasting fresh for an extra day or so. We used a large scoop to make the scones; the bowl held just shy of a quarter cup.

Anyway, I don't know why, but scones are just one of those things that only taste good at fancy tea rooms -- any time I buy them at Starbucks or the bakery they are incredibly stale. Exciting that it was so easy to make them!

Oatmeal-Raspberry Bars

This recipe for Oatmeal-Raspberry Bars is one that's been floating around in my recipe file for awhile-- since June 2009, to be precise. It was in a great feature for summer picnic food in Real Simple. I immediately recalled it when Central Market had a $2.99 raspberry sale last week! These bars are the same basic concept as the Corner Bakery raspberry bars, but with the addition of oatmeal and fresh raspberries. In my mind, this makes this a healthy dessert (even though my husband tasted one and his first question was, "how much sugar is in these?!") I made a change when I made these and used the whole pint of raspberries. Substituting in baking was obviously a bad idea; they tasted great, but were a little watery because of the extra fresh raspberry. C'est la vie. For the seedless raspberry jam, I used seedless raspberry spread -- it was more jelly-like than jam, but given the whole raspberries I think this works. I'm excited to try out other berries in the future-- blueberries in particular seem like an easy switch-- and maybe a low-sugar or Splenda jam. Oh wait... I just said I would stop substituting...