Fruit scones recipe and I win some delicious cupcakes

I got a wonderful Facebook message yesterday evening. I've won half a dozen cupcakes from Eastbourne Cooke's Cakes! The company is run by superb baker Vee Cooke with whom I used to work. Now she's running her own cake baking business which I am happy to highly recommend. It's been a few years now since I've been treated to Vee's creations so this is definitely something to look forward to when we swan back through Sussex in April. Woo hoo! Thank you Vee!

Earlier yesterday, by coincidence, I had actually been doing some baking

Eight freshly baked fruit scones 

of my own - a simple batch of fruit scones. I was defeated by a tub of aged baking powder when trying for a banana bread loaf last week, but we have since got fresh supplies from Consum (such a great name for a supermarket!). The rain in Spain was falling on the hills so we didn't fancy walking and I was temporarily between books, biscuitless and, dare I say it, a tad bored. So while Dave did man stuff by washing the car, I went all girly and dusted the inside of the caravan with a fine layer of flour! The following ingredients made eight good sized scones.

Ingredients:
210g plain flour with 15g baking powder (or 225g self raising flour)
Pinch of salt
25g brown sugar
55g butter
120ml milk
Good handful of sultanas

Preheat the oven to 200c and dust a baking sheet with a little extra flour.

Put the 210g flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together into a large bowl. Chop the butter into pieces and rub it into the flour until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Add the sultanas and stir in. Add the milk a little at a time, mixing it in with a flat bladed knife until you have a dough that is soft but not sticky. My scrawled recipe actually calls for 150ml milk, but I don't think I've ever needed to use the whole amount so I've put a reduced volume here. 

If your pastry cutters are not currently in storage in a different country(!), roll out the dough to about 2cm thick, then cut 5cm wide circles and place them on the baking sheet. If you don't have pastry cutters, you can either roll out the dough as above and improvise; or pull away pieces of dough and gently roll them into flattened balls as I did. They don't have the classic scone shape but the taste is just as good.

Bake in the preheated oven for about 10 minutes. Our oven in the house only used to take 8 minutes. The caravan one today took nearer to 15 minutes and the tray needed turning part-way through. Serve warm or cold with butter and jam. We didn't have any cream, but the local fig jam tasted good.