Scones

There needs to be a soupçon of crisp, created of course by butter, that crumbles about in your mouth as your tongue searches for the velvety mixture of cake-like biscuit, thick cream and tart raspberry jam.

Ah, the scone.  Simple and essential element to an afternoon tea.  Perhaps you’ve sat in the high-ceilinged tea room of Victoria’s Empress Hotel, one of the old Canadian Pacific Railway hotels, sister to the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta and Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City.  The scones sit on the second plate of the three-tiered cake stand, expected to be preceded by the little sandwiches (one of them Always Egg, another Must Contain Cucumber), and followed by thumb-sized pastries like lemon tarts, chocolate ganache cakelets and heart-shaped shortbread cookies.

But growing up for me, scones were a breakfast alternative to thick porridge thinned with jam and milk.  My dad, an Englishman, made them, always perfect, to be devoured while still so hot that butter slid off before the first bite.  Sometimes blueberries would stain the insides a faint purple.
Here is his recipe, beginning with a hot, preheated oven to 425:

2 cups plus a little more of flour and 3 t baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt and 2 T sugar
Mix the above.  Add in 1/2 c raisins or blueberries if you wish. 
In a glass measuring cup, 1/3 c veg oil and 2/3 c milk. Add the liquid to the dry.
Gently Stir with a fork til the mixture cleans sides of bowl and it comes away from the sides of the bowl into a ball.
Form into 8 round scones and bake 20 mins at 425.

And to settle the argument of pronunciation: either scone as rhyming with ‘gone’ or scone as rhyming with ‘bone’ are correct.  For the British, it depends partly upon region.  My dad was from Liverpool in the north of England where the dominant pronunciation is scone as in ‘gone’; for Londoners it is the other way around. 
“So there we are!” as my dad would say.  And enjoy your scones.