Scones…all of a sudden!

Something I’ve wanted to eat, so desperately, every time I read an Enid Blyton book.

Scones, warm and buttery, shared over an evening tea.
Scones, warm and buttery, topped with strawberry jam and a dollop of cream, shared by friends in their garden shed.
Scones, warm and buttery, filled with the goodness of blueberries, wolfed down by hungry girls after a lacrosse match!
Scones, warm and buttery, relished while perched on the strong boughs of the Faraway Tree!

As a 12-year-old living in Trivandrum of the late 90s, scones were something that could only be savoured in my imagination! I imagined the taste, the texture, the softness, the pure joy. I imagined it to look inviting and appealing. I imagined having it at one of my school parties after final exams. I imagined unpacking a box of scones during a school excursion. I have imagined a lot of scones, in short 😀

After about 7-8 years, I found something in a bakery, which the owner told me was a  Cream Scone. I jumped at it, bought one, bit into with much joy and immediately spat out and threw from my hand 😀 Yuck. “These aren’t scones“, I told him indignantly. It was just something shaped like an ice-cream cone, filled with sugary cream. Uuuugh. It was not warm, not buttery, and definitely not soft. And, did not look in the least fancy!

In time, I forgot about them. Then, after the Internet age dawned and flourished, every time I came across the word scones, I always meant to look it up, but never managed to.

Until last Thursday,  11th October 2018 (yes, verrrrrrrrrry late, I know!), when I opened my blog, saw a reply to a comment I left in another blog on Enid Blyton books and was hit by the thought of warm buttery scones! I immediately went on Google to look for images of scones and went “EH!?”

I guess despite telling the shopkeeper what he gave me wasn’t a scone, I might have expected scones to actually be shaped like a cone and have jam and butter filling 😀 Or, at least to look more fancy. These pics did not look fancy at all! Well, not the scones by themselves (though the accompaniments made the whole photograph pretty colourful and bright). They didn’t look warm or buttery or soft. Maybe I imagined it all wrong and simply craved for the wrong thing all these years. Blow Enid Blyton and her art of converting the mundane into yummilicious awesomeness!

Yesterday, Sunday, a colleague returned to work from his 3-week Canadian vacation and told us how he learnt from his aunt to make…yes, scones! What a coincidence. To this, another colleague went “Oooh, really? I’ve always wanted to taste a scone.” And, there I interjected and dashed her dreams using my new-found knowledge on scones, saying it’s not as fancy as it sounds, it is a flat, squarish thing and “looks more like an egg puff with no egg inside” 😛 And she goes “Really? I thought it was like a cone-shaped something, creamy and sweet“. And then, accompanied by nods from the new scone chef, I proceeded to tell her how it’s made and how quick and simple the whole process is, and most importantly how it is not shaped like a cone.

And today, Monday, I ate my first ever scone! And, while it looked exactly as scones look, the dear little thing definitely lived up to every bit of my imagination.

It was warm, buttery, soft and oh-my-good-lord-delicious! ❤

And now, I feel like an entire era has come to an end 😉 The Age of the Scones is officially over!