Megan makes Nigella's Buttermilk Scones Vegan

I don't know about where you are right now, but here in Australia's national capital it's starting to cool down for winter.  It's time to do warm and comforting things like have hot soup and slip into something a little more flanelette.  (typed like only a lady who lives by herself (with her cats) can).

As luck would have it, pumpkin was also ridiculously cheap at my local fruit and veggie shop.  Of course, so far I haven't even mentioned Nigella's buttermilk scones yet, but I'm getting there, I promise.

Nigella tells us that scones are an essential part of an afternoon tea.  She also introduces an item called "clotted cream" that you're supposed to have with scones, along with some pictures from a clotted cream factory.  As far as I can see from the show, it looks like clotted cream is incubated cream that's of a thick and cottage-cheese like texture.  I did some research and here's what wikipeda told me.  "Clotted cream has been described as having a "nutty cooked milk flavour" with "oily globules on the crusted surface".. hang on... cooked milk? sorry but I hate that smell.  oily globules? hmmm crusted surface?  dude I was just waiting for the word "pustule" or "fistula" to come up next.  As Nigella didn't make clotted cream on the show, and as it doesn't sound like something I'd like to replicate, I'm not even going to go there.

I watched Nigella's scone episode with baited breath... as usual cross legged on my couch in front of the TV note-book in hand.  Nigella is up to her usual tricks.  I think she used 2 cups of flour, if the measure she uses to scoop flour is a cup size.  She added a container of buttermilk, but didn't show the container to the camera very well and also neglected to tell her audience what size the container was.  I realise suddenly that it's going to be a struggle to do scones without an accurate recipe in the first place, let alone try and modify that recipe to make it vegan.

Hey Megan, here's a recipe for you.  Take a tsp of concrete and harden up!

So, I decided to make my own twist on scones and add a bit of Australian and vegan food culture into the mix.  Making scones is not difficult, anyone can do it.  However you do have to get the ratios of all the different ingredients right.  Also, as pumpkin was super cheap and it's soup weather, I decided to multi-task and cook some pumpkin soup at the same time.  It's a bit of a step up for the inexperienced cook, but this is a very efficient way of doing things.  At the end of this blog, you could have a great batch of scones and containers of soup in your freezer for lunches or for a night when you don't feel like cooking.  Saves you time and money how good is that.

I started off with this recipe here: http://www.bestrecipes.com.au/recipe/Pumpkin-Scones-L1549.html

The pumpkin scone recipe was actually invented by an Australian, Lady Florence Bjelke Peterson.  She was a Queensland senator from the early 1980's to 1993.  She also makes totally kick-arse pumpkin scones.

The recipe is fairly straight forward, and didn't take too much modification to make vegan.  I started out by chopping some pumpkin and boiling it in preparation to make mashed pumpkin.

Left: Butternut pumpkin, Right:Grey or Kent pumpkin.

Butternut pumpkin is generally a bit sweeter than the grey pumpkin, it's also a lot easier to chop.  If you are unsure of your kitchen knives of know from experience that chopping pumpkin is difficult then go for the butternut.  It doesn't matter really how small you chop your pumpkin, however if you're in a hurry to make the scones, then the smaller you dice the pumpkin the quicker it will cook.


About 300 grams of raw chopped pumpkin will make you one cup of mashed pumpkin.  Here's what mine looked like.

Put a pot of water on the stove, and get it boiling.  Then add the 300g of pumpkin.  You want it fairly soft so you can mash it, mine took about 15 minutes.  Yours will vary depending on how small you cut your pumpkin.  It's done when you can very easily poke a fork through the pumpkin.

Once the pumpkin is cooked drain the water off (using a colander like you would for pasta will do the job) and mash it.  If you don't have a potato masher. (plastic or metal kitchen utensil you can get from a supermarket, second hand shop or speciality kitchen shop) then you can mash the pumpkin with a wooden spoon like I did.

Once the pumpkin is mashed, put it in the fridge to get cold.  While the mashed pumpkin is chilling for the scones, I moved onto preparing my pumpkin soup.  If you don't feel like making the soup as well, then feel free to go and do something else while you wait for the pumpkin to get cold.  Go for a bike-ride or something it will take a while to chill down completely.

To make my pumpkin soup I chopped the rest of my pumpkin and weighed it to see how much I had.

Yet another picture of diced pumpkin on a kitchen scale

 It's hard to tell by that picture, but I have almost exactly 1kg of pumpkin.  That's enough to make four huge or six medium size servings of soup.  If you have 1.5kg of pumpkin, then just increase the amounts of other ingredients I give you by 50%.  I'm sure you get the general idea.

To make my pumpkin soup you'll need the following.
-1kg chopped pumpkin.
-1 brown onion
-1 tsp crushed carlic
-1tsp cumin
-4tsp veggie salt or vegeta, or 2 vegetable stock cubes.
-1 liter water
-1/2-1 cup soy milk.
-1tbs vegetable oil

You need to also chop the onion fairly finely. 

Put a big pot on the stove, add the oil to it, heat to a medium heat.  Once the oil spreads out, or becomes less viscous it's heated enough.

Add the diced brown onion, the crushed garlic and the cumin to the pot, stir them around to coat the onion with the oil and spices.  Let that cook for a few minutes. (3-5 minutes)  depending on your personal preference, you can do the next step either once the onion has gone translucent (just cooked) or when it's gone a little bit brown (more well done) don't let the onion burn.

Put one liter of water into your kettle and turn it on.  Getting the water boiling in there is more energy efficient and will help you get your soup finished faster. 

Once you are happy with the state of your onions add the pumpkin to the soup pot and give it a stir to mix everything around.  Here's what mine looked like.

Once the kettle has boiled add approximately 1 liter of boiling water to the pot.  Be careful if you are using a plastic measuring cup, as you don't want to splash the boiling water onto your hands.  It's okay if this is approximate.  If you accidentally add a bit too much water don't fret, just let the soup boil for a bit longer and the excess water will evaporate.  At the end of the soup-process if the soup is too thick for your liking, then don't fret, you can always add more liquid later.  It's your soup, you can make it just the way you want it.

Now that the water is in, add your choice of veggie salt, veggie stock cubes etc.  If you are using stock cubes then crumble them with your fingers into the pot to help them dissolve better.  If you have health concerns and need to follow an extremely low-salt diet, then you can omit the stock and just use water.  You can taste test the soup towards the end, and adjust it with extra garlic or spices if you want.

Now you want to leave the soup to simmer for a while.  Simmering is a slow boil, so you want to see small bubbles on the surface of the soup, but not big fast rolling bubbles.  I ended up with my stove on quarter power with the lid off.  I like my pumpkin soup very thick, so I'm happy to let some of that water evaporate.  If you prefer your soup less thick then cooking on low power with the lid on will keep the moisture in.  Your soup will take anywhere from half an hour, to forty five minutes to be cooked.  You want the pumpkin really really soft as it's going to be blended up at the end.

Now that the soup is cooking away, check on your mashed pumpkin in the fridge and see how it's going.  If its room temperature or colder it's fine to make your scones.  The reason you can't use the mashed pumpkin while it's hot is that it will melt the fat in the recipe which will change the texture of the scones.

So scomes... here we go.

Firstly, pre-heat your oven to 200C, and prepare a big flat tray by spraying it with some vegetable oil spray, or covering it with a sheet of baking paper.

Lady Flo wants me to start off with 55g of butter.  I start off with 55g of nuttelex.  You're all familiar with this stuff now I'm sure! you'll find it at the supermarket in the same area the butter is.

The originator with the flavour

Lady flow wants me to beat the butter until it's soft, then add some sugar.  I beat the butter until it's soft but omit the sugar purely because of my personal taste, I don't have a big sweet tooth.  The sugar won't impact the texture of your scones.

After this, I look over at the stove and give my soup a big stir to make sure it's doing okay. 

Lady flow now wants me to mix the mashed pumpkin in with the butter.  easy... done.

She now wants me to mix an egg in there too.  Sorry Lady Flo, I'm going to use some stuff called 'no egg'.  it's an egg replacer you can find in the health-food aisle at the supermarket.  It comes in a box.  The box tells me that a tablespoon of no egg plus two tablespoons of water will replicate an egg in a baking recipe.  In they go.

Now Lady Flo wants me to add half a cup of milk.  I add half a cup of soy milk, and mix it up.  This will look pretty "wet" but don't worry, you're going to add the self raising flour soon.

You need to follow the instructions a bit carefully here, and add the flour bit-by-bit.  You need 2.5 cups of self raising flour, so if you add it in five increments of half a cup each that will work out fine.  Make sure that before you add the next increment the first increment is fully mixed through. 

At this stage I checked my soup and gave it another stir.  My pumpkin was still fairly hard and needed more cooking.  If your pumpkin is very soft and starting to break apart, then you can turn the stove off, put the lid on the pot and keep it there until you're ready to get back to the soup for the next stage.

My resultant dough was fairly 'sticky'.  If your dough is too sticky you can add a little extra flour. Add it in small increments, about a dessert spoon at a time.  It's likely that your dough will be fairly sticky as well.  Don't fret this is common with pumpkin scones.

Once you are happy with your dough, then sprinkle some flour on a work surface.  Top tip for those who don't love cleaning up their kitchen, you can restrain yourself to a large chopping board to make the clean-up easier, it can be simpler to wash a chopping board than to wipe down your whole bench.  tip your dough our onto the floured work surface.

This isn't like bread, you don't need to kneed the dough very much at all.  To correctly kneed the dough you should do the following.

1)pat the dough down until it's about half the height compared to when just tipped out of the bowl.
2)take the top part of the dough, and fold it in half towards yourself, like a calzone or pastie shape.
3)rotate the dough ninety degrees.
4)repeat steps one and two.

Your scone dough will need to be taken through the above process four times maximum. 

Once you've done that you can either pat the dough down until it's about 2cm thick.  If you have a rolling pin that will make the job a bit quicker, but your hands will do the job just fine.

scone dough ready to cut

 You can see in the picture above that I'm using a glass to cut my scones out into nice circles.  I'm dipping the edges of the glass into the flour, then starting out at the edges to cut as many scones as I can.  Place each scone on your prepared tray as you go.

you will end up with 'scraps', make these into a blob again, roll them out and cut again.  you may end up with one slightly funny-shaped scone at the end.  Nobody will mind.

Once you've cut out your scones and got them all onto the tray put them in the oven to bake for 15 minutes.  You'll be in the kitchen finishing the soup while they are cooking so there's little risk of over-doing them.  Once they start to smell wonderful they're done.

I check on my soup now, and discover that happily my pumpkin is really soft and breaking up.  It's time to blend my pumpkin soup.  If you have a stick blender and can blend the soup while it's still in the pot that's great.  If not don't worry, pumpkin soup was invented before the stick blender was, just use your potato masher.  It will be quicker than you think as long as your pumpkin is really really soft.

Once your soup is mashed or blended, return it to the stove on a low heat.  Start by adding 1/2 cup of soy milk and stir through.  Use extra soy milk, water, or a bit more cooking time to adjust the texture of the soup to your personal taste.  Once you are happy with the texture, then taste the soup.  Is it good?  could it do with more bite?-add a little bit of pepper more zing?-add a little more crushed garlic, or even some crushed ginger  not salty enough?-add a pinch more salt.  Once you are happy, keep the soup on a low heat with stirring until it simmers again, then turn the stove off, it's ready to go.

If things play out just right, the time it takes you to finish the soup will be about the same as the time it takes for the scones to be ready. 

Here's what my finished soup looked like;

Pumpkin soup

If you're serving this to guests, you can be a bit fancy and decorate the top with chopped chives or a sprig of parsley or coriander.

Here's how the pumpkin scones came out.   If your sense of smell doesn't tell you the scones are done, then once the timer goes off you can try a simple test.  Using oven gloves turn one of the scones upside down and give it a tap on the bottom.  If it sounds hollow it's done.

 That would been a really cool arty shot if I could focus the bloody camera.

  The soup and scones were well received.  A colleague suggested that I enter them into a country show.  That would actually be a very good test of my scones... to see if they can truly go head-to-head with their non-vegan counterparts. 

In summary.. My scones are different to Nigella's.  I think they achieve the same job though, these scones would be absolutely respectable and lovely to take when visiting grand-ma.  The soup..... fantastic.  The perfect tummy-warmer on a chilly day.

Have a go at making these and let me know how it works out for you.  Happy cooking!