Which 2020 Baking Club did you join?
Have you been lovingly cultivating a sourdough starter with a punny name? Are you growing a miniature garden in water glasses with the ends of your vegetables? How many loaves of banana bread have you made this year?
After killing a sourdough starter a few years ago and having to discard its moldy, alcoholic corpse, I knew not to go down that path. I set up a scallion garden on my living room window sill, until the day I decided to use my new dust buster and found their brittle husks and dried out brown roots, forlorn and abandoned behind the curtains. My one successful bandwagon bake was all the way back in the first week of San Francisco’s lockdown, when I braved the hordes at Safeway for a packet of vanilla pudding mix and a bag of chocolate chips, to make Chrissy Teigen’s famous banana bread.
Maybe because my banana bread was swept up in a vortex of carb loading that first week, I had almost forgotten about this particular genre of quarantine baking until Claire told me the other day she had leftover bananas but couldn’t bring herself to make another banana bread. I hadn’t really thought about banana bread since the two loaves I made in March, but then, I don’t regularly buy bananas. I’m not looking for ways to use them up most of the time.
If you do have this problem, but you are over banana bread, what do you do with your bananas? How many bananas do you have left? How ripe are your bananas? How many times can I type the word bananas?
There are options. You can freeze bananas and add to smoothies, of course. My friend Ginny recently made classic banana pudding, with vanilla pudding from the box and nilla wafers, which was a great reminder of what I should have done with my box of pudding (I have no idea what it added to the banana bread, actually). You could also turn that into a cake, too, if you want a project.
But Claire’s comment also reminded me that I’ve been sitting on a recipe for banana blueberry scones! I first started testing out this recipe last November, and I finally felt like I’d cracked it, but then travel and holidays happened, and I felt like I should wait to share it in blueberry season. And now we’re here, and I had completely forgotten about these!
It’s been long enough since I first tested this recipe that I wasn’t even sure if I’d found my final notes, so of course I had to test these out again. I’m happy to report they are as excellent as I hoped, and live up to the scones I’ve been imagining since 2009, when I first tasted the banana/blueberry combo at Alice’s Tea Cup in New York.
I have no idea when I’ll get back to New York or to Alice’s for another scone and a pot of my favorite Sessa tea, but for now, these will hold me over. And if you, like Claire, are looking for banana bakes, might I suggest these scones?
Banana Blueberry Scones
Makes 6 scones
2 1/4 cups flour plus more, for counter
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp kosher salt
1 stick unsalted butter, cold
1/2 cup yogurt + 1/4 cup water (or 3/4 cup buttermilk)
1 very ripe banana, lightly mashed
zest of one small lemon
1/2 cup blueberries, frozen
turbinado sugar, for garnish
Heat oven to 400 degrees. In the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt, then cut the butter into small cubes and scatter into the dry mixture. Using the paddle attachment on low speed, work the butter into the mixture until you have small pieces about the size of peas.
In a measuring cup, whisk together the yogurt and water until smooth (or if using buttermilk, just add to the bowl), then add to the bowl with the banana and the lemon zest, if using. Stir until everything starts to come together, working the banana throughout (some chunks of banana left are ok).
Add the frozen blueberries and gently mix in, trying not to break them up too much (though a little purple is ok!). Turn the dough out onto a floured counter and shape into a round at least 1 1/2 inches thick. Cut the round into 6 wedges, transfer the wedges to a parchment lined baking sheet. Sprinkle with the sugar, and bake for 25 minutes until browned and golden.