Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Beer for breakfast: Autumn Maple Oat Scones with Raisins

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple.  Today's comes from one of our regular contributors, The Beerista Blog!  Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!






A beer that is brewed with yams, maple syrup, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice is just begging to be used to make delectable baked good. It’s not often I get to have beer for breakfast, so to fix that problem and to put The Bruey’s Autumn Maple in its place, I decided to whip up a batch of oat scones using the beer. This recipe came together quickly and produced an excellent scone that had just a hint of sweetness and faint notes of the Autumn Maple beer. Simply split open and topped with butter served alongside fruit and coffee made for a fantastic start to my day. Move over Starbuck’s blueberry scone, the beer scone has arrived!

Autumn Maple Oat Scones

Ingredients
1 ¾ cup flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
½ cup oats
1 tablespoons baking power
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
½ pound + 3 tablespoons butter, cold, unsalted and diced
1 + ¼ cup autumn maple (to be used separately)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup raisins (optional)
1 egg, beaten 1 tablespoon of water (egg wash)
3/4 cup powder sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla
What you need to do
Make the dough
Start by putting 1 cup of Autumn Maple in a sauce pan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Once boiling, lower the heat to simmer the beer. Allow it to simmer until it is reduced by half to 1/2 cup of beer. Watch carefully for foam-ups and boilovers. You don’t want to lose any beer! If it starts to foam up on you, just remove the pot from the stove for a few minutes until it settles down. Once it is reduced, remove the pan from the heat and allow the reduction to cool completely. You will use ¼ cup of this reduction for the dough, and the other ¼ cup for the glaze.


Next, preheat your oven to 400 degrees while you work on the dough. Combine the flours, oats, baking powder, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Using an electric mixer on low speed, mix in the cold, diced butter until pea sized crumbly dough/butter pieces form. This can take a while, so be patient.

In a separate bowl, combine ¼ cup Autumn Maple beer (straight from the bottle, not reduced),¼ cup of the reduced beer and 2 eggs lightly beaten. Once mixed, quickly add the wet mixture to the flour mixture and blend until just combined. If using raisins, add them in and mix to incorporate. The dough is pretty sticky and loose still. That’s OK.



Roll out, cut and bake the scones
Turn the dough onto a well-floured surface. Dust your hands and a rolling pin with flour. Roll the dough out to ¾ inch thick. Cut the scones into your desired shape and place them on a greased baking sheet. I just used the rim of a small juice glass to cut round scones since I don’t have a proper cutter. It worked great. You could also simply cut the dough with a knife into squares or the popular triangle shape.
Once all the scone are cut and on the baking sheet, brush the tops of the scones with the egg wash (1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon of water) then in the over they go! Bake them for 20 – 25 minutes, until the tops are beginning to get golden brown.



Make the glaze
While the scones are baking, make the yummy glaze. To do this, simply combine the other ¼cup of reduced beer, powdered sugar and vanilla in a bowl. Mix until smooth and all of the sugar is dissolved. You want it to be thick, but still pourable. If you think it is too thin, add a bit more powdered sugar.
When the scones are done, remove them from the oven and place on a piece of aluminum foil or a cooling rack to, well, cool. After about 15 minutes, dip the tops of the scones in the glaze and place them back on whatever you were using to cool. Let the glaze settle for about 5 minutes, then enjoy!
The scones keep for 5 days (assuming they last that long) on the counter in an air tight container.


Note: You can make this recipe up to the part where you cut and place the scones on a baking sheet, but instead of baking them, you can put the tray in the freezer. Once the unbaked, but cut scones are frozen, put them in an airtight container or zip block bag and keep them in the freezer. You now have ready to bake scones. Pull out and bake 1, 2 or 15 at a time to curb you beer scone craving.



For more amazing recipes made with beer, check out

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