It's four o'clock...must be time for...

SCONES! My sister Daniella and I share a deep and abiding love for scones. Must be a remnant of our English ancestry. When she lived just a few streets away, we would very often drop in to visit one another in the late afternoon and make tea and scones. I miss those impromptu tea parties a lot since she moved away...so whenever we do manage to visit, tea and scones are definitely on our list of "sister time events!"

This weekend she and Phillip came down for an all-too-short visit, and there was so much going on that we didn't manage to fit in our tea party. But Joseph persuaded me to make some gluten-free scones for breakfast yesterday, and I managed to save one for her - no easy task, because Joseph is definitely my son in that respect! (Evidenced by the fact that he talked me into making scones again for breakfast today! okay, so it wasn't very hard...;-) I recently found an incredibly easy and delicious gluten free scone recipe that I am very excited about. It uses Pamela's gluten-free baking mix, which I found on an amazing deal at Amazon.com. I adapted it for my favorite scone flavor, but you can change the basic recipe to include whatever flavor you like best. Here's the recipe, in case you're interested:

Cranberry-Almond Gluten Free Scones

2 1/4 cups Pamela's all-purpose baking mix
1 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup sugar (these are sweet enough to eat plain, but you can reduce the sugar a bit if you want to eat them with jam)
3/4 cup dried cranberries
4 T butter
2/3 cup milk
1 egg
1/4-1/2 tsp almond extract
slivered almonds (optional)

Whisk the dry ingredients together until well mixed. Cut in the butter until mixture is grainy and resembled coarse crumbs. Stir in the cranberries. Mix together the milk, egg, and almond extract, and then pour into the dry ingredients. Mix together gently with a fork until a thick, moist batter forms. Use a large spoon to scoop little mounds of dough onto an ungreased baking sheet. (Makes about a dozen scones, depending on the size of your scoop.) Sprinkle slivered almonds on top, if desired. You can also brush with milk or cream and then sprinkle raw sugar on top. Bake at 375 for 15-17 minutes. Scones will be light brown on top. Finally, eat the entire batch. (okay, that's not actually an instruction, but its hard not to!)

I suspect these would be really good with blueberries instead of the cranberries, or with poppyseeds and lemon flavoring, or chopped apricots...I just haven't had any other ingredients. But the recipe seems fairly adaptable, and they are sooo good. Enjoy!