LUSCIOUS

The New Jersey peaches are starting to smell so good at our corner market, so we picked up a few for snacking. They had all that good stuff about peaches – the juiciness, the texture, the fragrance – but they weren’t very sweet. Peachy, but not sweet. So this morning the chef suggested making a batch of peach scones. Yum, right?! Yeah. Given the peaches’ unsweetness, I clearly needed to macerate the chopped peaches for a bit to bring out/add sweetness. Peel, chop, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, stir, wait.

Make Dorie’s scone recipe I’ve been modifying and playing with (hers are apple cheddar scones, but I’ve been making them with other ingredients), that’s a plan! Yum, cinnamony peach scones. My mouth was watering.

So I made the dough and without thinking, poured in the peaches for the final gentle stir. With all the juices. Lots of juice. Wasn’t thinking. And I looked in horror at my dough that had become batter.

But what’re you gonna do? All those delicious ingredients, nothing to lose by baking the soggy mass. So I poured it onto my silpat, in a very roughly round blob, sprinkled some sugar on top, and baked it. It did smell good while it was baking, I had to admit that. (Oh, in this version of the story I’m telling, I’m leaving out all the cussing I was doing. A lot of cussing and self recrimination. Not pretty.)

As I was melting some butter to brush on top of the thing when I pulled it out of the oven, the chef wondered about adding a bit of brown sugar to the melted butter. What the hell! Into the butter went a bit of brown sugar. Pull the thing out of the oven, brush the sugary butter on top and wait. It kind of looked ok, maybe it would be edible, anyway.

When I pulled it off the silpat onto the rack to cool, it kind of crumbled apart into several very large parts. Hmmm. Looked kind of ok on the inside, after all. We each took a piece of this not-a-scone thing and took our first bite.

And it was good. It was kind of like cobbler and scones had a baby. Something in between. Scobbler, I’m calling it. And from such mistakes a new thing is born. Don’t worry about that little bit of red in the photo – no blood was shed. I tossed in a few raspberries for fun.

side view

the scobbler landscape

If you do this, you’re going to be certain that it won’t work. It’s practically batter, no way it’s going to work. It works, and it is yummy.