The Best Scone Recipe (with Video!)

Today I’m sharing my carefully tested and perfected BEST scone recipe. Tender, flaky, buttery, and with plenty of tips on how to add your favorite mix-ins! This recipe is simple and comes together in less than 30 minutes (including bake time!). Recipe includes a how-to video!

The Best Scones of Your Life (Seriously)

I always thought that scones were unapproachable. I don’t know if it was the name, their unusual wedge-like shape, or what, but something about them just seemed too fancy and high-brow for my humble kitchen.

It wasn’t until college when I was procrastinating from writing a particularly tedious Psychology paper that I decided to first try my hand at them and was shocked to find that, hey, scones are actually really, really simple.

In fact, they’re just about the furthest thing from unapproachable. Scones aren’t much different from biscuits (and if you’ve tried my easy biscuit recipe, you know how humbly straightforward that recipe is), their fluffy, buttery interiors are just slightly sweeter and their shape is just a bit more pointed.

Let’s dig in to today’s recipe so you can learn everything there is to know about how to making scones in your own kitchen.

What You Need

All of these ingredients are basics that you probably already have on hand. I’m not going to go over each one, but let’s touch on a few key players:

• Flour. Use plain (all-purpose) flour and not self-rising or your scones will become much too tall and tip over.
• Butter. This is possibly the most important ingredient in my scone recipe recipe. If you can get your hands on it, I recommend a high quality European butter, which is more expensive but has a higher fat content and makes for delectable, tender results.
• No egg! I don’t usually list out ingredients that we don’t use, but I’ve gotten a lot of comments asking if I simply forgot to include an egg in the ingredients. Nope! There is no egg needed, I found that using one here makes the scones less flaky and less melt-in-your-mouth. We use heavy cream here for our fat and to bind the dough together.
• Mix-ins. My scones recipe is perfect without any additions whatsoever, but if you’d like you can add frozen fruit (or fresh fruit, it’s just a bit messier), chocolate chips, dried fruit, nuts, or your favorite fruit zest. They’re so easy to customize!

Tip: Keep your butter as cold as possible! I like to freeze mine for at least 15-30 minutes before I begin making scones. Cold butter pieces distributed throughout the dough makes for tender, flaky, buttery layers. If the butter gets too warm at any point, your scones are prone to becoming flat and dense.

Why a Food Processor?

I haven’t always used one, and in fact all of my previous scone recipes (like my chocolate scones) were made by cutting the butter into the dough using a pastry cutter or grater. However, scone dough is pretty dry, and a lot of people had trouble getting the dough to cling together doing this manually.

By using a food processor instead, the machine does all of the heavy lifting for us without overworking our dough. I highly recommend using one if you have it! Pictured above is the food processor (affiliate) that I use. It was a bridal shower gift 4 years ago and it’s a workhorse, I use it all the time!

Tip: Always press straight down when cutting your scones, never saw into the dough! A straight cut helps them to rise straight and properly, sawing will yield scones that tip over with less defined edges.

Frequently Asked Questions

Pictured above is a lemony variation, I included notes in the recipe below on how to make them this way, too!

More Recipes You Might Like

• Pumpkin Scones
• Lemon Poppy Seed Scones
• Crepes
• Waffles

Enjoy!

Let’s bake together! Make sure to check out the how-to VIDEO in the recipe card! 

Recipe originally published July 17th 2018, updated to provide more information, answer frequently asked questions and to be more clear, recipe remains the same!