And the Dish: Apple Oat Scones

These may sound healthy, but don't worry. They still taste quite good. There is no sugar in the dough; the sweetness comes from the apple -- so, I recommend a nice sweet one for this. I think I used a HoneyCrisp.

Ingredients

1 c. unbleached white flour

1 c. whole wheat flour

1/2 c. rolled oats

1 TB baking powder

2 TB ground flaxseed

3/4 tsp cinnamon

1/8 tsp. nutmeg

1 stick butter, frozen

3/4 c. vanilla yogurt

1/4 c. milk

1 medium apple, peeled, cored and diced

1 TB half & half

1 TB honey

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F and line half-sheet pan with parchment.

Combine dry ingredients. Grate the frozen butter into dry ingredients. (Alternatively, work in cold butter, cut into small pieces. The colder the fats in most baked goods, the better the texture of the resulting treat.) Give this a few good squeezes and tosses with your hands, just to work the frozen butter in a bit.

In a separate bowl, toss the diced apple with 1 TB of the mixed dry ingredients. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add yogurt, milk and apple. Stir a few times until dough starts to come away from the sides of the bowl.

Turn out onto a lightly floured surface. A little note: When making scones (or hand-kneaded dough of any kind), I love my pastry bench scraper. I use it to push flour underneath the dough as I pat it into shape, to cut the scones and to transfer the scones to the sheet pan. It looks a lot like this:

Love it.

Anyway, turn dough out, then give it a few kneads and turns just to make it all come together. Once it's mostly holding together, pat into a rectangle... about 11" x 5" and a little over 1" thick. Fold the bottom third up and the top third down, like a letter; then pat into another rectangle.

Using a chefs knife or your scraper, cut the rectangle into as many scones as you'd like, whatever size you like. Transfer to parchment-lined half-sheet pan.

Whisk together the half & half and honey until uniform. Brush on top of the scones with pastry brush.